'No, no!' she cried with a little passion, making as if to clasp my arm afresh, and then shrinking. 'I could not help his coming here and speaking to me.'
'That is true.'
'Why are you angry?'
Her gaze pleaded, her lips twitched, even as she looked at me her blue eyes filled. Her grieved, pretty face, her wistful, tender, tearful face, must have transformed my temper into impassioned pity, into self-reproach, into keen self-resentment, even had there been solid ground for vexation. I took her hand and lifted it to my lips.
'Forgive me; we have been much together. Our association and your father's dying words make me think of you as mine until—until—the long and short of it is, Helga, I am jealous!'
An expression of delight entered and vanished from her face. She stood thoughtfully looking down on the deck. Just then Punmeamootty entered to prepare the table for supper, and Helga again went to the cabin window and stood looking out, lightly, with unconscious ease and grace, swaying to the stormy heave of the deck, with her hands clasped behind her in a posture of meditation.
CHAPTER IV.
A NIGHT OF HORROR.
The gale broke on the morning of Thursday, November 2. The compacted heaven of cloud scattered in swelling cream-coloured masses; the sun shone out of the wide lakes of moist blue, and the sea turned from the cold and sickly gray of the stormy hours into a rich sapphire, with a high swell and a plentiful chasing of foaming billows. By four o'clock in the afternoon the ocean had smoothed down into a tropical expanse of quietly rising and falling waters, with the hot sun sliding westwards and the barque stemming the sea afresh under all cloths which could be piled upon her, the wind a small breeze, about west, and the sea-line a flawless girdle.