get another peep into
those long, cool, gray eyes of hers and see them grow melting soft as she
looks at me. She is no Juliet, thank the Lord; and thank the Lord I am
no Romeo. And yet I go up alone on the freezing poop, and under my
breath chant defiantly at the snorting gale, and at the graybeards
thundering down on us, that I am a lover. And I send messages to the
lonely albatrosses veering through the murk that I am a lover. And I
look at the wretched sailors crawling along the spray-swept bridge and
know that never in ten thousand wretched lives could they experience the
love I experience, and I wonder why God ever made them.

* * * * *

"And the one thing I had firmly resolved from the start," Margaret
confessed to me this morning in the cabin, when I released her from my
arms, "was that I would not permit you to make love to me."

"True daughter of Herodias," I gaily gibed, "so such was the drift of
your thoughts even as early as the very start. Already you were looking
upon me with a considerative female eye."

She laughed proudly, and did not reply.

"What possibly could have led you to expect that I would make love to
you?" I insisted.

"Because it is the way of young male passengers on long voyages," she
replied.

"Then others have . . . ?"

"They always do," she assured me gravely.

And at that instant I knew the first ridiculous pang of jealousy; but I
laughed it away and retorted:

"It was an ancient Chinese philosopher who is first recorded as having
said, what doubtlessly the cave men before him gibbered, namely, that a
woman pursues a man by fluttering away in advance of him."

"Wretch!" she cried. "I never fluttered. When did I ever flutter!"

"It is a delicate subject . . . " I began with assumed hesitancy.

"When did I ever flutter?" she demanded.

I availed myself of one of Schopenhauer's ruses by making a shift.

"From the first you observed nothing that a female could afford to miss
observing," I charged. "I'll wager you knew as quickly as I the very
instant when I first loved you."

"I knew the first time you hated me," she evaded.

"Yes, I know, the first time I saw you and learned that you were coming
on the voyage," I said. "But now I repeat my challenge. You knew as
quickly as I the first instant I loved you."

Oh, her eyes were beautiful, and the repose and certitude of her were
tremendous, as she rested her hand on my arm for a moment and in a low,
quiet vo