Boyne stood talking to his mother, with his hands, which he had not grown to, largely planted on the jambs of her state-room door. She was keeping her berth, not so much because she was sea-sick as because it was the safest place in the unsteady ship to be in. “Do you want me to send Ellen to you!”
“I will attend to Ellen, Boyne,” his mother snubbed him. “How is Lottie?”
“I can’t tell whether she’s sick or not. I went to see about her and she motioned me away, and fairly screamed when I told her she ought to keep out in the air. Well, I must be going up again myself, or—”
Before lunch, Boyne had experienced the alternative which he did not express, although his theory and practice of keeping in the open air ought to have rendered him immune. Breckon saw his shock of hair, and his large eyes, like Ellen’s in their present gloom, looking out of it on the pillow of the upper berth, when he went to their room to freshen himself for the luncheon, and found Boyne averse even to serious conversation: He went to lunch without him. None of the Kentons were at table, and he had made up his mind to lunch alone when Ellen appeared, and came wavering down the aisle to the table. He stood up to help her, but seeing how securely she stayed herself from chair to chair he sank down again.
“Poppy is sick, too, now,” she replied, as if to account for being alone.
“And you’re none the worse for your little promenade?” The steward came to Breckon’s left shoulder with a dish, and after an effort to serve himself from it he said, with a slight gasp, “The other side, please.” Ellen looked at him, but did not speak, and he made haste to say: “The doctor goes so far as to admit that its half a gale. I don’t know just what measure the first officer would have for it. But I congratulate you on a very typical little storm, Miss Kenton; perfectly safe, but very decided. A great many people cross the Atlantic without anything half as satisfactory. There is either too much or too little of this sort of thing.” He went on talking about the weather, and had got such a distance from the point of beginning that he had cause to repent being brought back to it when she asked:
“Did the doctor think, you were hurt?”
“Well, perhaps I ought to be more ashamed than I am,” said Breckon. “But I thought I had better make sure. And it’s only a bruise—”
“Won’t you let ME help you!” she asked, as another dish intervened at his right. “I hurt you.”
Breckon laughed at her solemn face and voice. “If you’ll exonerate yourself first,” he answered: “I couldn’t touch a morsel that conveyed confession of the least culpability on your part. Do you consent? Otherwise, I pass this dish. And really I want some!”