“What is the matter?” asked Clif, startled. “Are you ill?”
“No—no, a little attack, that’s all, don’t ye know,” replied Cate, recovering himself with an effort. Another moment and he had regained his usual composure.
“Haw! bah Jove, Richard is himself again,” he drawled, carefully adjusting his eyeglass. “So his royal highness is coming aboard? I’ll be glad to—aw—meet him, don’t ye know.”
“And so will he be glad to meet you—not,” replied the cadet, the last word sotto voce.
With a low bow and a smile to Juanita, he hurried away to his station.
The two girls strolled to the other side of the quarter-deck as if unconscious of the Englishman’s presence.
Once alone, the latter’s face again took on that hunted expression noticed by Clif. He leaned against one of the broadside guns and stared absently through the port.
“It is fate,” he muttered; “grim fate. It is ordered and must be done. It’s a pity, too. The other chance was so good. Just think of it; strings of them, and each worth a fortune. And the girl, too. If I had the opportunity and that cub of a boy was out of the way—but what’s the use of dreaming? Duty first, then pleasure. Yes, pleasure, if”—he laughed mirthlessly—“if I live to enjoy it.”
A shrill piping of the boatswain’s whistle interrupted his soliloquy, and he turned to see a rainbow of gay bunting flaunt bravely from a line stretched over the three mast trucks.