"I should think they'd want to kill them."
"Oh, Mr. McKay! On the contrary they—they grow to like them—exceedingly."
"You dare not say that about yourself and me."
Miss Erith shrugged her pretty shoulders: "I don't have to say anything, do I?"
He made no reply. After a long silence she said casually: "The sea is calmer, I think. There's something resembling faint moonlight up among those flying clouds."
He lifted his tragic face and gazed up at the storm-wrack speeding overhead. And there through the hurrying vapours behind flying rags of cloud, a pallid lustre betrayed the smothered moon.
There was just enough light, now, to reveal the forward gun under its jacket, and the shadowy gun-crew around it where the ship's bow like a vast black, plough ripped the sea asunder in two deep, foaming furrows.
"I wish I knew where we are at this moment," mused the girl. She counted the days on her fingertips: "We may be off Bordeaux…. It's been a long time, hasn't it?"
To him it had been a century of dread endured through half-awakened consciousness of the latest inferno within him.
"It's been very long," he said, sighing.