“I think that you are a little too harsh with me, Miss Earle.”
The young lady placed her finger between the leaves of the book and closed it, looking up at him with a frank, calm expression in her dark eyes, but said nothing.
“You see, it’s like this. I said to you a little while since that I seem to have known you before. Now, I’ll tell you what I was thinking of when you met me this morning. I was thinking what a curious thing it would be if I had been acquainted with you some time during my past life, and had forgotten you, while you had remembered me.”
“That was very flattering to me,” said the young lady; “I don’t wonder you laughed.”
“That is why I did not wish to tell you what I had been thinking of—just for fear that you would put a wrong construction on it—as you have done. But now you can’t say anything much harsher to me than you have said, and so I tell you frankly just what I thought, and why I asked you those questions which you seem to think are so impertinent. Besides this, you know, a sea acquaintance is different from any other acquaintance. As I said, the first time I spoke to you—or the second—there is no one here to introduce us. On land, when a person is introduced to another person, he does not say, ‘Miss Earle, this is Mr. Morris, who is a younger partner in the house of So-and-so.’ He merely says, ‘Miss Earle, Mr. Morris,’ and there it is. If you want to find anything out about him you can ask your introducer or ask your friends, and you can find out. Now, on shipboard it is entirely different. Suppose, for instance, that I did not tell you who I am, and—if you will pardon me for suggesting such an absurd supposition—-imagine that you wanted to find out, how could you do it?”
Miss Earle looked at him for a moment, and then she answered—
“I would ask that blonde young lady.”
This reply was so utterly unexpected by Morris that he looked at her with wide eyes, the picture of a man dumbfounded. At that moment the smoking-room steward came up to them and said—
“Will you have your coffee now, sir?”
“Coffee!” cried Morris, as if he had never heard the word before. “Coffee!”