The crash of a shell drowned his voice. Then came a deathly silence, then the sound of the deck-guns in action once more.
Miss Erith was leaning rather heavily on his arm. He bent it, drawing her closer.
"I don't want to leave you," she said again.
"I told you—"
"It isn't that…. Don't you understand that I have become—your friend?"
"Such a brute as I am?"
"I like you."
In the silence he could hear his heart drumming between the detonations of the deck-guns. He said: "It's because you are you. No other woman on earth but would have loathed me… beastly rotter that I was—"
"Oh-h, don't," she breathed…. "I don't know—we may be very close to death…. I want to live. I'd like to. But I don't really mind death. … But I can't bear to have things end for you just as you've begun to live again—"
Crash! Something was badly smashed on deck that time, for the brazen jar of falling wreckage seemed continuous.