He attempted an easy gesture of gallantry, but overbalanced himself and fell sideways on the pallet with a gasp.  Yet there was so much genuine feeling mixed with his grotesque affectation, so much piteous consciousness of the ineffectiveness of his falsehood, that the young girl, who had turned away, came back and laid her hand upon his arm.

“You must lie still and try to sleep,” she said gently.  “I will return again.  Perhaps,” she added, “there is some one I can send for?”

He shook his head violently.  Then in his old manner added, “After Mademoiselle—­no one.”

“I mean”—­she hesitated; “have you no friends?”

“Friends,—­ah! without doubt.”  He shrugged his shoulders.  “But Mademoiselle will comprehend”—­

“You are better now,” said Rosey quickly, “and no one need know anything if you don’t wish it.  Try to sleep.  You need not lock the door when I go; I will see that no one comes in.”

He flushed faintly and averted his eyes.  “It is too droll, Mademoiselle, is it not?”

“Of course it is,” said Rosey, glancing round the miserable room.

“And Mademoiselle is an angel.”

He carried her hand to his lips humbly—­his first purely unaffected action.  She slipped through the door, and softly closed it behind her.

Reaching the upper deck she was relieved to find her father had not returned, and her absence had been unnoticed.  For she had resolved to keep De Ferrieres’ secret to herself from the moment that she had unwittingly discovered it, and to do this and still be able to watch over him without her father’s knowledge required some caution.  She was conscious of his strange aversion to the unfortunate man without understanding the reason, but as she was in the habit of entertaining his caprices more from affectionate tolerance of his weakness than reverence of his judgment, she saw no disloyalty to him in withholding a confidence that might be disloyal to another.  “It won’t do father any good to know it,” she said to herself, “and if it did it oughtn’t to,” she added with triumphant feminine logic.  But the impression made upon her by the spectacle she had just witnessed was stronger than any other consideration.  The revelation of De Ferriefres’ secret poverty seemed a chapter from a romance of her own weaving; for a moment it lifted the miserable hero out of the depths of his folly and selfishness.  She forgot the weakness of the man in the strength of his dramatic surroundings.  It partly satisfied a craving she had felt; it was not exactly the story of the ship, as she had dreamed it, but it was an episode in her experience of it that broke its monotony.  That she should soon learn, perhaps from De Ferrieres’ own lips, the true reason of his strange seclusion, and that it involved more than appeared to her now, she never for a moment doubted.