She took the miniature in silence.
‘She is not like you,’ said I.
‘Not in the least,’ she exclaimed. ‘I am little; she is very tall. She has a commanding manner, a rich voice, and indeed,’ she added with a smile, and then looking down, ‘anyone might suppose her of noble blood.’
I should have liked to tell her how very much sweeter and prettier she was than her sister; what a very different sort of heart, as it seemed to me, from her ladyship’s, looked out at you from her violet eyes; how very much more good, pure, gentle, sympathetic, womanly, was the expression of her mouth compared with what I had found in the portrait’s. But our friendship was rather too new just then for such candour as this; yet I would not swear that some faint suspicion did not cross her of what was in my mind, though so subtle are women’s ways, so indeterminable by words the meaning that may be perfectly emphatic to every instinct in one in the turn of the head, a droop of the lid, a sudden soft tincturing of the cheek, that I have no reason to offer for supposing this.
She took the miniature to her cabin, and I waited awhile, thinking she would return. I then lighted a cigar, but as I stepped towards the companion with the design of killing the rest of the afternoon till the dinner-hour on deck, Muffin came down the steps. He looked hideously sallow, and carried a horribly dismal expression of countenance, but he appeared to be no longer in liquor.
‘Well,’ said I shortly, ‘how are you now, Muffin?’
‘Uncommonly queer, I am sorrowful to say, sir,’ he answered, patting his stomach and falling away on his left leg with a humbly respectful downcast look and a writhe of the lips into a smile that would have been expressionless if it was not that it increased his ugliness by the exhibition of a row of fangs of the colour of the keys of an ancient harpsichord. ‘The sea is not a congenial spear, sir.’
‘Sphere, I suppose you mean,’ said I; ‘but give yourself a day or two, man; the sickness will wear off.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’—he paused, still keeping his eyes downward whilst he bowed meekly and respectfully, but with an air of profound dejection.
‘Well?’ I exclaimed, running my gaze over the fellow’s odd figure with a yearning to laugh in me at the sight of the gouty bulgings of his feet over his pumps.