“Why should I interrupt you?” she said. “Why not let me try whether I can’t help you instead? Is it a secret?”
“No, not a secret.”
He hesitated as he answered her. She instantly guessed the truth.
“Is it about your ship?”
He little knew how she had been thinking in her absence from him of the business which he believed that he had concealed from her. He little knew that she had learned already to be jealous of his ship. “Do they want you to return to your old life?” she went on. “Do they want you to go back to the sea? Must you say Yes or No at once?”
“At once.”
“If I had not come in when I did would you have said Yes?”
She unconsciously laid her hand on his arm, forgetting all inferior considerations in her breathless anxiety to hear his next words. The confession of his love was within a hair-breadth of escaping him; but he checked the utterance of it even yet. “I don’t care for myself,” he thought; “but how can I be certain of not distressing her?”
“Would you have said Yes?” she repeated.
“I was doubting,” he answered—“I was doubting between Yes and No.”