Anything more was lost to the ears of the two young men on the bridge, as she and the captain strolled slowly aft. But the rippling laughter reached their ears from time to time.
"Not very penitent, that!" laughed McLeod.
"Did you catch on to the reason she gave for saucing me, because she didn't know that I was a medical doctor? It was just when she found out that I was a doctor that she gave me the worst. Doesn't that beat the Dutch?"
"'O woman! in our hours of ease,
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,'"
quoted McLeod.
In the light of the binnacle lamp the two friends looked into each other's eyes and laughed heartily. There was no cynicism, no cheap scoff at a woman's variableness. Instead there was that manly healthy-mindedness which can afford to laugh at her inexplicable ways, and honour and admire her still.
"By the way, McLeod, Dr. MacKay put it all over Clark this evening, didn't he? I couldn't hear it all. Caught just the last few sentences. But I thought, from what I heard, that he was giving that old Mormon some knockout blows."
"You're right he was. But not half as much as he deserved. There are some white men who come out here who wouldn't be decent company for pigs. Clark is one of them. I'm no paragon of virtue, and I don't set up to preach to others. But there are a lot of us on the China Coast who try to keep decent enough not to be ashamed to go home once in a while and look our mothers and sisters in the face. There are a number of others who are simply rotten. They give us all a bad name. Mormon! Yes, worse than that! He could give points to old Abdul Hamid of Turkey."
A dash of warm rain driving before a sharp squall of wind struck them. The Hailoong was rising and falling with the mighty heave of the great swells which were following each other in regular succession from the south, each apparently bigger than the last. Captain Whiteley climbed the ladder to the bridge.
"Looks as if we were in for a bad night, Mr. McLeod."