A look you have about the eyes told me that."

"I'm not being unselfish now," Max broke out impulsively; then, fearing
he had said an indiscreet thing, he hurried on to something less
personal. "How would it be," he suggested in a studiously commonplace
tone, "if I should make myself comfortable sitting on my suitcase, just
near enough to your berth to keep you from falling out in case another
of those monsters hit the ship? You could go to sleep, and know you were
safe, because I'd be watching."

"How good you are!" said the girl. "But I don't want to sleep, thank
you. I don't feel faint now. I believe you've given me some of your
strength."

"That's the brandy," said Max, very matter of fact. "Have a few drops
more? You can't have swallowed half a teaspoonful----"

"Do you think, if I took a little, it would make me warm? I'm so icy
cold."

"Yes, it ought to send a glow through your body." He poured another
teaspoonful into the miniature silver cup, and supported the pillow
again, that she need not lift her head. Then he took the two blankets
off the upper berth, and wrapped them round the girl, tucking them
cozily in at the side of the bed and under her feet.

"If you were my brother," she said, "you couldn't be kinder to me. Have
you ever had a woman to take care of--a mother, or a sister, perhaps?"

"I never had a sister," Max answered. "But when I was a boy I loved to
look after my mother."

"And now, is she dead?"

"Now she's dead."

"My mother," the girl volunteered, "died when I was born. That made my
father hate the thought of me, because he worshipped her, and it must
have seemed my fault that she was lost to him. I haven't seen my father
since I was a little girl. But I'm going to him now. I've practically
run away from the aunts he put me to live with; and I'd hardly any
money, so I was obliged to travel all the way second-class."

"That's exactly what I thought!" ejaculated Max.

"Did you think about _me_, too?" she asked, interest in their talk
helping her to forget the rolling of the ship.

"Yes, I thought about you--of course."

"That I'd run away?"

"Well, you were so different from the rest, it was queer to see you in
the second-class."

"But so are you--different from the rest. Yet you're in the
second-class."

"I'm hard up," exclaimed Max, smiling.

"You, too! How strange that we, of all the others, should come together
like this. It is as if it were somehow meant to be, isn