“He is very funny, no doubt,” she said; “but I think one gets a little tired of his perpetual gaiety.  I don’t think we should find him so delightful if a storm came on.  I haven’t much faith in those people who can never take anything really seriously.  I believe he would die laughing.”

“All the better,” declared Mrs. Langdale, who loved Charlie’s impetuous ways with maternal tolerance.  “It is always better to laugh than cry, my dear; though it isn’t always easier by any means.”

She departed with the words, laughing a little to herself at Molly’s critical mood; and Captain Fisher went and sat stolidly down beside Molly, who turned to him with an instant smile of welcome.  She was the only lady on board who was never bored by this man’s quiet society.  She liked him thoroughly, finding the contrast between him and his volatile friend a great relief.

Fisher never talked frivolities; indeed, he seldom talked at all.  Yet to Molly the hour he spent beside her on that sunny day in the Mediterranean passed as pleasantly and easily as she could have desired.

Captain Fisher might seem heavy to others, but never to her—­a fact of which secretly she was rather proud.

II

“Come up on deck!” whispered Charlie in an eager undertone.  “There’s no one there, and the night is divine.”

Molly Erie looked at the strange figure in fancy-dress beside her and laughed aloud.  She had not allowed Charlie a tete-a-tete for many days, but she felt that he could scarcely attempt to be sentimental in that costume.

She went with him, therefore, thinking what a pretty girl he would have made.

Charlie led her to the deck-rail.  His ridiculous figure was less obtrusively absurd in the dim light.  His laughing voice, lowered half-confidently, half-reverently, sounded less inconsequent than was its wont.

Suddenly he turned to her and spoke with wholly unexpected vehemence.

“I can’t keep it in,” he said.  “You’ve got to know it.  Molly, I love you most awfully.  You do know it, I believe, without being told.  Why do you always run away and hide when I try to speak?”

He spoke quickly, jerkily.  She glanced at him with a nervous movement as she drew back.  He was not laughing for once, yet she fancied there was the shadow of a smile quivering about his face.  Possibly it was an illusion.  The dim light made everything indefinite.  But the suspicion roused in her in full strength her prejudice against him.  She drew back deliberately, and her anger grew from scorn to cruelty during the moments that intervened between his question and her answer.

“You have chosen a very appropriate occasion,” she remarked icily at length.  “Do you imagine yourself irresistible when playing the fool, I wonder?”

He faced round on her.

“I have taken the only opportunity I could get,” he said.  “I am a slave of circumstance.  If I had come to you in rational costume you would not have consented to sit out with me.”