Indeed, she had met nobody as yet save the Yankee shipmaster; and he scorned such artificialities of life aboard ship as reclining chairs. He paced the bridge with a friendly watch-officer, or encircled the ship on a "two-hour constitutional" for exercise.
"I couldn't sit mum by myself in one o' these chairs and do nothing," he confessed to the nurse. "I'm not a readin' man. Long watches below at sea I used to play push—and I play it yet."
"What is 'push'?" she asked curiously.
"It's seaman's solitaire. Ain't once in five hundred times it comes out right. But it keeps the mind occupied. And that's a blessin', as you'd very soon learn if you was master of a windjammer, months and months away from port."
"With the expectation of another daughter arriving during your absence whom your wife would be sure to christen to displease you," Belinda suggested slyly.
"By Hannah! Yes. And more'n that. Why, I've seen the time at sea when I've buried all my friends and relations—in my mind, of course—and preached their funeral sermons. It does beat all how a person that's lonesome will get so low in his thoughts."
Belinda did not feel in the least lonely, despite the fact that Aunt Roberta remained in her berth. Although there were not many first cabin passengers and the opportunity for meeting pleasant people was therefore limited, there was much else about the ship that interested the girl. The sea itself was always changing, and she had not crossed often enough for the small details of life on board ship to bore her.
Before she had read a dozen pages in her book (it was "The Flying Faun" she had brought with her) she saw the trim figure of Frank Sanderson coming down the deck. The aviator was not a large man—not many men who follow the flying game are large men—but Belinda had already noticed that he was very well built, and walked "with an air," as Aunt Roberta would have said.
He was looking at the cards on the empty chairs, searching for his own. Suddenly he spied it, and without troubling the deck steward started to move the chair to a position that better suited him.
It was at this juncture that he raised his eyes and found himself looking squarely into Belinda Melnotte's brown orbs. She saw him start, pale a little, and then the blood flooded into his neck and face until the sprinkle of little freckles across the bridge of his nose—that looked as though they had been shaken out of a pepperbox—became a bright copper color.