‘Poor girl!’ she sighed, and looked away.

The man’s face did not change, and if his next words echoed the sympathy she expressed his tone did not.

‘I was a good deal cut up myself,’ he observed coolly.  ’Here’s your book, Madame Cordova.’

‘No,’ Margaret answered with a little burst of indignation, ’I don’t want it.  I won’t take it from you!’

‘What’s the matter now?’ asked Mr. Van Torp without the least change of manner.  ’It’s your friend Mr. Lushington’s latest, you know, and it won’t be out for ten days.  I thought you would like to see it, so I got an advance copy before it was published.’

He held the volume out to her, but she would not even look at it, nor answer him.

‘How you hate me!  Don’t you, Madame Cordova?’

Margaret still said nothing.  She was considering how she could best get rid of him.  If she simply brushed past him and went back to her chair on the lee side, he would follow her and go on talking to her as if nothing had happened; and she knew that in that case she would lose control of herself before Griggs and Miss More.

‘Oh, well,’ he went on, ’if you don’t want the book, I don’t.  I can’t read novels myself, and I daresay it’s trash anyhow.’

Thereupon, with a quick movement of his arm and hand, he sent Mr. Lushington’s latest novel flying over the lee rail, fully thirty feet away, and it dropped out of sight into the grey waves.  He had been a good baseball pitcher in his youth.

Margaret bit her lip and her eyes flashed.

‘You are quite the most disgustingly brutal person I ever met,’ she said, no longer able to keep down her anger.

‘No,’ he answered calmly.  ’I’m not brutal; I’m only logical.  I took a great deal of trouble to get that book for you because I thought it would give you pleasure, and it wasn’t a particularly legal transaction by which I got it either.  Since you didn’t want it, I wasn’t going to let anybody else have the satisfaction of reading it before it was published, so I just threw it away because it is safer in the sea than knocking about in my cabin.  If you hadn’t seen me throw it overboard you would never have believed that I had.  You’re not much given to believing me, anyway.  I’ve noticed that.  Are you, now?’

‘Oh, it was not the book!’

Margaret turned from him and made a step forward so that she faced the sharp wind.  It cut her face and she felt that the little pain was a relief.  He came and stood beside her with his hands deep in the pockets of his overcoat.

’If you think I’m a brute on account of what I told you about Miss Bamberger,’ he said, ’that’s not quite fair.  I broke off our engagement because I found out that we were going to make each other miserable and we should have had to divorce in six months; and if half the people who are just going to get married would do the same thing there would be a lot more happy women in the world, not to say men!  That’s all, and she knew it, poor girl, and was just as glad as I was when the thing was done.  Now what is there so brutal in that, Madame Cordova?’