d the quiet pleasant manner of his
speech, which certainly looked not as if Mrs. Amos had any reason for
her fears; but he was speaking earnestly, and she observed too the
unbending look of the savage in answer and a certain pleasant deference
with which he appeared to be listening. Mr. Rhys had taken off his hat
for a moment--it hung in his hand while the other brushed the hair from
his forehead. Eleanor's eye even in that moment fell to the hand which
carried the hat; it was the same,--she recognized it with a curious
sense of bringing great and little things together,--it was the same
white and carefully looked-after hand that she remembered it in
England. Mr. Rhys's own personal civilization went about with him.

Eleanor did not hear any of Mrs. Amos's words to her, which were
several; and though Mrs. Amos, half alarmed by her deafness, did not
know but she might be witnessing something dreadful on deck, and spoke
with some importunity. Eleanor was thinking she had not a minute to
lose. Beyond the time of Mr. Rhys's talking to the other visitor on the
schooner's deck, there could be but small interval before he would
learn all about her being on board; two words to the skipper or Mr.
Amos would bring it out; and if she wished to gain that first minute's
testimony of look and word, she must be beforehand with them. She
thought of all that with a beating heart in one instant's flash of
thought, hastily caught up her ship cloak without daring to stop to put
it on, slipped back the bolt of the door, and noiselessly passed out
upon the deck. She neither heard nor saw anybody else; she was
conscious of an intense and pitiful shame at being there and at thus
presenting herself; but everything else was second to that necessity,
to know from Mr. Rhys's look, with an absolute certainty, where _he_
stood. She was not at that moment much afraid; yet the look she must
see. She went forward while he was yet speaking to his black neighbour,
she stood still a little behind him, and waited. She longed to hide her
eyes, yet she looked steadfastly. _How_ she looked, neither she nor
perhaps anybody else knew. There was short opportunity for observation.

Mr. Rhys had no sooner finished his business with his sable friend,
when he turned the other way; and of course the motionless figure
standing so near his elbow, the woman's bonnet and drapery, caught his
first glance. Eleanor was watching, with eyes that were strained
already with th