.

"Oh!" Virginia jumped back with a startled cry and looked fearfully at
her companion. He was smiling, and intuitively she recognized that it
was not a smile of amusement, but of sympathy, reassurance.

"Oh, wasn't it horrid!"

"Yes, it was not a pretty sight," replied Dan. "Derelicts never are.
There are lots of them around here; they travel in currents, sometimes in
short orbits, sometimes hundreds of miles in a straight line."

The terror had not left her eyes, and she glanced astern to where the
ugly shape was burying itself in the gloom. She was an impressionable
girl, and that loathsome object, rising as it were out of the bottom of
the deep, clanking, sighing, brought to her an epitome of all the fear
and mystery of the great, dark, silent waste. And she looked at the
Captain with new interest. Here was one of the men who brave these
things, who brave great big problems, who face the unknown and a future
as full of mystery, as fraught with evil possibilities as when the first
mariner put out to the Beyond in a boat hollowed from a tree. In a flash
that derelict taught her to read Dan better; gave her a better insight
into the look that she sometimes caught in his steely, inscrutable eyes,
and the grave lines in his sun-bronzed face. And in the light of this
knowledge her soul went out to this man, this type of man, so strange, so
utterly foreign to a girl brought up in an environment where such types
do not exist.

She held out her hand.

"I am going to my stateroom now, Captain. Good-night. We are going to
be better friends, aren't we?"

"Thank you," said Dan; and he watched her tall, white form as it
disappeared down the deck. He gazed moodily out at the dark horizon.
Friends! He searched himself thoroughly, and he could not deny the truth
as formulated in his mind. Friends! How hollow the word sounded! He
knew how hollow it would seem all through his life.

Better it should be nothing. Yes, far better, instinct told him that.
Miss Howland had come into his existence, radiant, pure, beautiful, and
so utterly feminine; as a meteor flashing across the night pauses for a
brief instant in the sky before shivering to nothingness. This simile
occurred to Dan, who, though no poet, was at least a sailor and as such a
student of the heavenly bodies. Yes, a meteor which had illumined his
life.

He had never permitted himself to think in this way before. It is
doubtful if before to-night he