I said "Yes," in a subdued voice, and sat down on the end of the bench near her, adding, "Will the captain take it amiss if we converse?"
"No," she answered, "but should he forbid it and then find you speaking to me, his temper would be dreadful. He is a terribly passionate man. Yet he is gentle to me, and speaks of his wife and children with exquisite tenderness."
"His wife and children! God help him!"
"Oh!" she cried, trembling, "I cannot express to you the horror and pain I feel when I hear him talk of them as though he should find them as they were—altered by the length of a year only—when he parted from them. He does not know that he is cursed—none of them on board this ship know it of themselves."
"Is that so?" I exclaimed. "Surely their repeated failures to pass the Agulhas point must convince them that the will of God is opposed to their attempts and that they are doomed men."
She leaned her fair cheek upon her hand with a thoughtful absent expression in her violet eyes, though they remained fixed upon me with a child-like simplicity extraordinarily fascinating. I particularly noticed the beautiful turn of her wrist, the fairy delicacy of her nostrils and mouth, and the enchanting curve of her chin to her throat. Her figure was full, and in the swell of her breasts and the breadth of her shoulders, fining down into a waist in admirable harmony with her stature and make, you might seem to have witnessed every assurance of robustness. But you found a suggestion rather than a character of fragility in the beauty of her face that caused the very delight you took in the gold and lilies and violets of her loveliness to grow pensive. There was a complete absence of embarrassment in her manner towards me.
"If you please, what name am I to know you by?" she asked.
"Geoffrey Fenton," I answered, "and you?"
"Imogene Dudley." I bowed to her, and she continued, "Are you a sailor?"