“Mr. Staniford,” she began. It was the second time he had heard her pronounce his name; he distinctly remembered the first.
“Well?” he said.
“I want to speak to you about lending that book to Mr. Hicks. I ought to have asked you first.”
“Oh, no,” said Staniford. “It was yours.”
“You gave it to me,” she returned.
“Well, then, it was yours,—to keep, to lend, to throw away.”
“And you didn't mind my lending it to him?” she pursued. “I—”
She stopped, and Staniford hesitated, too. Then he said, “I didn't dislike your lending it; I disliked his having it. I will acknowledge that.”
She looked up at him as if she were going to speak, but checked herself, and glanced away. The ship was plunging heavily, and the livid waves were racing before the wind. The horizon was lit with a yellow brightness in the quarter to which she turned, and a pallid gleam defined her profile. Captain Jenness was walking fretfully to and fro; he glanced now at the yellow glare, and now cast his eye aloft at the shortened sail. While Staniford stood questioning whether she meant to say anything more, or whether, having discharged her conscience of an imagined offense, she had now reached one of her final, precipitous silences, Captain Jenness suddenly approached them, and said to him, “I guess you'd better go below with Miss Blood.”
The storm that followed had its hazards, but Staniford's consciousness was confined to its discomforts. The day came, and then the dark came, and both in due course went, and came again. Where he lay in his berth, and whirled and swung, and rose and sank, as lonely as a planetary fragment tossing in space, he heard the noises of the life without. Amidst the straining of the ship, which was like the sharp sweep of a thunder-shower on the deck overhead, there plunged at irregular intervals the wild trample of heavily-booted feet, and now and then the voices of the crew answering the shouted orders made themselves hollowly audible. In the cabin there was talking, and sometimes even laughing. Sometimes he heard the click of knives and forks, the sardonic rattle of crockery. After the first insane feeling that somehow he must get ashore and escape from his torment, he hardened himself to it through an immense contempt, equally insane, for the stupidity of the sea, its insensate uproar, its blind and ridiculous and cruel mischievousness. Except for this delirious scorn he was a surface of perfect passivity.