"Isn't he sweet?" murmured a motherly dowager to McPhulach, who was sitting near her.
The engineer started.
"Eh?" he ejaculated.
"Isn't he sweet?" repeated the dowager, shouting at him a little in the belief that he was deaf.
McPhulach did not answer for a moment. Before him there arose a vision of the Captain of the Hawk smashing right and left among his mutinous crew with a capstan-bar, and another picture of the same man as he led his rabble followers up the bullet-swept slope of the German island.
"Weel," he replied at last, "I wouldna go sae far as tae say that. He's a michty quare mon, ye'll ken."
The dowager's comment had been overheard by Lady Betty, and it set her thinking. Was it only to her eyes that this man whom she had once promised to marry seemed so grim and terrible? Lady Mitford had called him "sweet," Elfrida obviously adored him, and the others seemed to be at their ease with him. Why was it that his terrific personality seemed to disquiet her alone?
The matter was still exercising her mind when she came down that evening, dressed for dinner. She had heard Calamity go down a little earlier and had hastened her dressing in order to snatch a quiet talk with him before the others left their rooms. But he was in neither the smoking-room nor the library, and so she made her way to the gallery, where his ancestors gazed down from the walls in painted stiffness.
Here she found him, pacing up and down, apparently in a brown study. He looked up as she entered, and Lady Betty, after a second's hesitation, went to him and laid her hand upon his arm.
"I was sure you'd be here," she said softly. "I know you so well."