when she tilted her chin and stared the offender full in the eyes, propping her plump little hands in the side-pockets of her white reefer, Captain Mayo, like a man hit by a cudgel, was struck with the sudden and bewildering knowledge that he did not know much about women, for she asked, with a quizzical drawl, “Just what is there about me, dear captain, to inspire that everlasting regret which seems to be troubling you so much?”
Even then he did not grasp the full import of her provocative question. “It isn't you. I'm the one who is wholly to blame,” he stammered. “I have dared to—But no matter. I know my place. I'll show you I know it.”
“You dared to—What have you dared to do—besides what you just did?”
“I cannot tell you, Miss Marston. I don't propose to insult you again.”
“I command you to tell me, Captain Mayo.”
He could not comprehend her mood in the least and his demeanor showed it. Her command had a funny little ripple in it—as of laughter suppressed. There were queer quirks at the corners of her full, red lips.
“Now straighten up like your real self! I don't like to see you standing that way. You know I like to have all the folks on the yachts look at our captain when we go into a harbor! You didn't know it? Well, I do. Now what have you dared to do?”
He did straighten then. “I have dared to fall in love with you, Miss Marston. So have a lot of other fools, I suppose. But I am the worst of all. I am only a sailor. How I lost control of myself I don't know!”
“Not even now?” Still that unexplainable softness in her voice, that strange expression on her face. Being a sailor, he looked on this calm as being ominous presage of a storm.
“I am willing to have you report me to your father, Miss Marston. I will take my punishment. I will never offend you again.”
“You can control yourself after this, can you?”
“Yes, Miss Marston, absolutely.”
She hesitated; she smiled. She lowered her eyelids again and surveyed him
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