me."

They tramped the circuit once more. Neither of them spoke. The
trumpeter's bugle call to breakfast rang out.

At the bow she stopped and looked down at the waters they were
furrowing. It was a long time before she raised her head and met his
eyes. The color had whipped into her cheeks, but she put her question
steadily.

"Are you telling me... that I must lose my friend?"

"Isn't that for you to say?"

"I don't know." She faltered for words, but not the least in her
intention. "Are you--what I have always heard you are?"

"Can you be a little more definite?" he asked gently.

"Well--dissipated! You're not that?"

"No. I've trodden down the appetite. I'm a total abstainer."

"And you're not... those worse things that the papers say?"

"No."

"I knew it." Triumph rang in her voice. She breathed a generous trust.
To know him for a true man it was necessary only to look into his
fearless eyes set deep in the thin tanned face. It was impossible for
anything unclean to survive with his humorous humility and his pervading
sympathy and his love of truth. "I didn't care what they said. I knew it
all the time."

Her sweet faith was a thing to see with emotion. He felt tears scorch
the back of his eyes.

"The thing you know is bad enough."

"Oh, that! That is nothing... now. It doesn't matter."

Lieutenant Beauchamp emerged from a saloon and bore down upon them.

"Mrs. Van Tyle has sent me to bring you to breakfast, Miss Frome.
Mornin', Mr. Farnum."

"And I'm ready for it, We've been round the deck ever so many times.
Haven't we, Mr. Farnum?"

She nodded lightly to Jeff and walked away with the Englishman. The
sunshine of her warm vitality was like quicksilver in Farnum's veins.
What a gallant spirit, at once delicate and daring, dwelt in that vivid
slender form! A snatch of Chesterton came to his mind:

Her face was like an open word
When brave men speak and choose,
The very colors of her coat
Were better than good news.

"It is the hour of man: new purposes,
Broad shouldered, press against the world's slow gate;
And voices from the vast eternities
Publish the soul's austere apostolate.

Man bursts the chains that his own hands have made;
Hurls down the blind, fierce gods that in blind years
He fashioned, and a power upon them laid
To bruise his heart and shake his soul with fears."
--Edwin Markham.

CHAPTER 18