She was still.  She listened to the passion in his voice.  She was saying to herself that if she were to whisper the faintest yes, if she were but to sigh lightly her consent, he would do it.  He was capable of doing it—­without touching the earth.  She closed her eyes and smiled in the dark, abandoning herself in a delightful giddiness, for an instant, to his encircling arm.  But before he could be tempted to tighten his grasp she was out of it, a foot away from him and in full possession of herself.

That was the steady Freya.  She was touched by the deep sigh which floated up to her from the white figure of Jasper, who did not stir.

“You are a mad kid,” she said tremulously.  Then with a change of tone:  “No one could carry me off.  Not even you.  I am not the sort of girl that gets carried off.”  His white form seemed to shrink a little before the force of that assertion and she relented.  “Isn’t it enough for you to know that you have—­that you have carried me away?” she added in a tender tone.

He murmured an endearing word, and she continued: 

“I’ve promised you—­I’ve said I would come—­and I shall come of my own free will.  You shall wait for me on board.  I shall get up the side—­by myself, and walk up to you on the deck and say:  ’Here I am, kid.’  And then—­and then I shall be carried off.  But it will be no man who will carry me off—­it will be the brig, your brig—­ our brig. . . .  I love the beauty!”

She heard an inarticulate sound, something like a moan wrung out by pain or delight, and glided away.  There was that other man on the other verandah, that dark, surly Dutchman who could make trouble between Jasper and her father, bring about a quarrel, ugly words, and perhaps a physical collision.  What a horrible situation!  But, even putting aside that awful extremity, she shrank from having to live for some three months with a wretched, tormented, angry, distracted, absurd man.  And when the day came, the day and the hour, what should she do if her father tried to detain her by main force—­as was, after all, possible?  Could she actually struggle with him hand to hand?  But it was of lamentations and entreaties that she was really afraid.  Could she withstand them?  What an odious, cruel, ridiculous position would that be!

“But it won’t be.  He’ll say nothing,” she thought as she came out quickly on the west verandah, and, seeing that Heemskirk did not move, sat down on a chair near the doorway and kept her eyes on him.  The outraged lieutenant had not changed his attitude; only his cap had fallen off his stomach and was lying on the floor.  His thick black eyebrows were knitted by a frown, while he looked at her out of the corners of his eyes.  And their sideways glance in conjunction with the hooked nose, the whole bulky, ungainly, sprawling person, struck Freya as so comically moody that, inwardly discomposed as she was, she could not help smiling.  She did her best to give that smile a conciliatory character.  She did not want to provoke Heemskirk needlessly.