phase of her unreserved interest in the young Captain. So
long as he had remained a sort of quiescent _protege_, there could be
no possible harm in her attitude toward him. Evidently he did not
intend so to remain. There was of course, therefore, nothing to do but
reestablish their relations.

"I am afraid my responsibilities are too varied and serious for
discussion with--with any one," she said at length.

"But where they concern me?"

The girl stepped back slightly, drawing her skirts about her as though
recoiling, or, rather, withdrawing from the question. Yet despite her
desire to end the conversation, she really was curious as to his drift;
and, besides, he made the most romantic sort of picture as he stood at
her side, clean cut, bareheaded, and as self-assured evidently as any
man she had ever talked with. Her wish was to dismiss him with
admonition, gently, if plainly to be understood. But this she could
not do just then, and the realization of the fact irritated her.

"I suppose," she said slowly, "at least I have read that our
responsibilities do not cease with one's friends, but extend,
sometimes, even to--to acquaintances, or to persons, perhaps, whom one
does not know. What have I done or not done that suggested in your
mind ideas of my responsibility to you?"

Dan shook the fire from his pipe and smiled. "Why, you haven't done a
thing or left a thing undone," he said. "I thought the humor of my
suggestion would strike you as funny, make you laugh. But it didn't,
so I'll be serious. You were decent to me on the _Tampico_ and before;
and to-night, I don't know, but the lights and the music and the night
and all seemed to have gone into me, and I wanted to talk to a
woman--to you--out here in the moonlight, not as we've talked before,
but as a man and woman who feel pretty much the same way about many
things might talk. This was what I had in mind when I spoke of
responsibility. Not an alarming one, would you say?"

The girl gazing out into the darkness did not speak.

"I wanted you to look down at the harbor there and exclaim over the
path the moon is cutting from the horizon to that queer little
lighthouse on the point; and I wanted you to talk enthusiastic nonsense
about the big, soft stars and the cigarette lights under the trees; and
I--I just wanted to listen and, of course, agree with all you said."

Dan was smiling as he spoke; but the girl, whose eyes had fallen
beneath his st