The skipper felt like a fool, then like a whipped dog. It was this last sensation that sent a wave of choking anger through him. He was not accustomed to it. Had any other woman taken him to task so he would have laughed and forgotten the incident in a minute. Had any man shown such ingratitude he would have smashed his head; but now his dark face flushed and he muttered a few words thickly which passed unheard and unheeded even by himself.
"I am writing now," continued Flora, "and must ask you to send it out to some place from which it can reach civilization, and be mailed to New York. It is very important—almost a matter of life and death to me—for it may yet be in time to save my career, even my engagement in New York."
The skipper maintained his silence, crushing his cap in his big hands and glowering at the rag-mat under his feet. Two kinds of love, several kinds of devils, pride, anger and despair were battling in his heart.
"Ye'll take out the letter, skipper, sure ye will," said Mary, smiling at him across the bed. Her fair face was pink and her eyes perturbed. The man did not notice the pink of her cheeks or the anxiety in her eyes.
"Why, of course you will take it—or send it," said Miss Lockhart. "It is a very small thing to do for a person for whom you have already done so much. You are the kindest people in the world—you three. You have saved my life twice, among you. I shall never, never forget your kindness, and as soon as I reach New York I shall repay you all. I shall soon be rich."
Black Dennis Nolan looked at her, straight into her sea-eyes, and felt the bitter-sweet spell of them again to the very depths of his being. Her glance was the first to waver. A veil of color slipped up softly across her pale cheeks. Young as she was, she had seen other men gaze at her with that same light in their eyes. They had all been young men, she reflected. Others, in Paris and London, had looked with less of pure bewitchment and more of desire in their eyes. She was not ignorant of her charms, her power, her equipment to pluck the pearl from the oyster of the world. She could marry wealth; she could win wealth and more fame with her voice and beauty on the concert-stage; she could do both. But in spite of her knowledge of the great world, her heart was neither blinded to the true things of worth nor entirely hardened. If she ever married, it would be for wealth and position, as the world counted such things, but never a man—lord or commoner—who did not come to her with the light of pure witchery in his eyes. She remembered, smiling down at the half-written letter to her New York agent, how that light had shone in the honest eyes of a young officer of the ship in which she had sailed from America to Europe. Her reflections, which had passed through her brain with a swiftness beyond that of any spoken or written words, were interrupted by the skipper.
"I bes rich now," he said thickly.
Mary Kavanagh lost color at that and turned her face away from them both, toward the fire in the wide chimney. Flora Lockhart looked up at the speaker, puzzled, but still smiling faintly. Her face was very beautiful and kind—but with an elfin kindness that seemed not all womanly, scarcely all human. Her beauty was almost too delicate, striking and unusual to bear the impress of a common-day kindness. She laughed gently but clearly.
"I am glad you are rich," she said. "You are rich in virtues, I know—all three of you."
"I bes rich in gold an' gear," said the skipper. "Rich as any marchant."