be. And this for Dan; this simple love song with its
swelling iterations. It awakened sleeping poetry in the heart of the
young commander, awakened a tenderness long hidden under the rough
exterior of a tumultuous life.

There was no mistaking the identity of the singer, no mistaking those
deep, full notes, vibrant, rounded, and so melodious. To whom was she
singing? Could a woman sing like that, sing as Miss Howland sang, to
no one? Impersonally? Dan turned his face down at the group. The
women were muffled in greatcoats, for the soft evening, which had
tempted them to the deck, was growing chill, and he could see the dark
forms of the men and the red lights of their cigars. Wotherspoon had
just finished a comic song, and they were all laughing and applauding.

Somehow it all emphasized in Dan his aloofness. He heard Oddington
address some jocular remark presumably to Miss Howland, for he caught
her laughing reply. And the thought came, how eminently eligible
Oddington was to sit at her side; how fitting that he should be
there--wealthy, distinctly of her set, a good fellow at the university,
and now a law partner in the practice which his hard-working father had
prepared for him. For the first time, perhaps, in his life Dan felt
himself humbled, and a great wave of bitterness flooded his mind. . . .
And yet Miss Howland had been very kind to him. Ah, but that was not
the point. He did not want persons to be kind; that suggested charity,
or pity. No; he wanted exactly what he earned--what he could take with
his bare hands and his bare soul. He wanted equality--or nothing; and
if at the end of his struggle it had to be nothing, all right--but the
end was not yet.

Toward nine o'clock the deck party began to break up. Some one had
suggested bridge, and some opposed the suggestion. At the end of a
laughing discussion Oddington and three others went to the
smoking-room, while the rest dispersed in various directions. Dan,
filled with his thoughts, was in the act of lighting his pipe, when the
clicking of footfalls and the rustling of skirts sounded on the bridge
steps. The next instant Virginia stood before him. The moonlight fell
upon her, outlining the girl distinctly in her long, blue,
double-breasted coat and the wealth of rippling dark hair flowing from
under an English yachting cap. She was smiling.

"Do I intrude upon your sacred precincts?" she asked, "or am I welcome?
I want to talk to yo