as he turned away made Rosey lift her
hands to her head. She had forgotten to remove her father's baleful
gift.

She snatched it off and ran quickly to the companion-way.

"Sir!" she called.

The young man turned half-way down the steps and looked up. There was a
faint color in her cheeks, and her pretty brown hair was slightly
disheveled from the hasty removal of the bonnet.

"Father's very particular about strangers being on this deck," she said
a little sharply.

"Oh--ah--I'm sorry I intruded."

"I--I--thought I'd tell you," said Rosey, frightened by her boldness
into a feeble anti-climax.

"Thank you."

She came back slowly to the galley and picked up the unfortunate bonnet
with a slight sense of remorse. Why should she feel angry with her poor
father's unhappy offering? And what business had this strange young man
to use the ship so familiarly? Yet she was vaguely conscious that she
and her father, with all their love and their domestic experience of
it, lacked a certain instinctive ease in its possession that the half
indifferent stranger had shown on first treading its deck. She walked
to the hatchway and examined it with a new interest. Succeeding in
lifting the hatch, she gazed at the lower deck. As she already knew the
ladder had long since been removed to make room for one of the
partitions, the only way the stranger could have reached it was by
leaping to one of the rings. To make sure of this she let herself down
holding on to the rings, and dropped a couple of feet to the deck
below. She was in the narrow passage her father had penetrated the
previous night. Before her was the door leading to De Ferriferes' loft,
always locked. It was silent within; it was the hour when the old
Frenchman made his habitual promenade in the city. But the light from
the newly-opened hatch allowed her to see more of the mysterious
recesses of the forward bulkhead than she had known before, and she was
startled by observing another yawning hatchway at her feet from which
the closely-fitting door had been lifted, and which the new lodger had
evidently forgotten to close again. The young girl stooped down and
peered cautiously into the black abyss. Nothing was to be seen, nothing
heard but the distant gurgle and click of water in some remoter depth.
She replaced the hatch and returned by way of the passage to the cabin.

When her father came home that night she briefly recounted the
interview with the new lodger, and