‘Mr. Dugdale, I thought of no one on board the Countess Ida. But let us avoid that subject—you have already been very plain-spoken.’
She ceased. I made no answer, and for some time we paced the deck in silence, harking then back again to the old topic of the captain’s intentions, the whereabouts of the Indiaman, and so on, and so on. By-and-by I looked at my watch; the dial-plate showed clearly by the starlight. It was eleven o’clock; and as I looked the ship’s bell rang out six chimes, which came floating down again in echoes out of the tremorless pallid concavities on high. Miss Temple was still most reluctant to leave the deck.
‘I am thinking of Mr. Chicken,’ she exclaimed.
‘Chicken’s ghost, like a hen’s egg, is laid,’ said I. ‘Besides, what remains of him will be all about my bunk.’
‘Oh for the Indiaman’s saloon,’ she cried, ‘for my dear aunt, for old Captain Keeling! How welcome would be a sight of even the most intolerable of the passengers, say Mr. Johnson; even that horrid little creature with the eye-glass, Miss Hudson’s admirer.’
‘I fear I am tolerated for the same reason that would render Mr. Johnson endurable to you.’
‘No!’ she answered quickly and warmly; ‘you are incessantly personal. I do not like it.’
‘Suffer me to escort you to your cabin?’
She lingered yet, turning her face to the skies.
‘How rich are those stars! Such lovely jewels are never to be seen in the English heavens. Mark how the meteors score the dark spaces between the lights with scars and paths of diamond dust! Oh that some gigantic shadowy finger would shape itself up there pointing downwards, to let us know where the Countess Ida is.’