I thought I was pleasing you."
The girl slowly dragged her chin sidewise along her palms until she faced
the Captain.
"Oh, you did! Has your experience with women taught you that is the best
way to please them?"
Dan, now completely at sea, simply regarded her in silence. Virginia,
inwardly triumphant, smiled.
"Now what can you do in four days to atone?"
"I might jump overboard."
"That would be romantic, but hardly--"
As the girl was speaking she turned her eyes to the water rushing past
the hull, just as a dull, wallowing shape flashed by the bow, assuming
form right under her eyes--a dark, soughing, coughing derelict, moving in
the waves spinelessly, like a serpent; black, slimy, repulsive, with
broken, hemp-littered masts and rusty chains clanking over the bow.
"Oh!" Virginia jumped back with a startled cry and looked fearfully at
her companion. He was smiling, and intuitively she recognized that it
was not a smile of amusement, but of sympathy, reassurance.
"Oh, wasn't it horrid!"
"Yes, it was not a pretty sight," replied Dan. "Derelicts never are.
There are lots of them around here; they travel in currents, sometimes in
short orbits, sometimes hundreds of miles in a straight line."
The terror had not left her eyes, and she glanced astern to where the
ugly shape was burying itself in the gloom.
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