Only the blighted being wandered the decks alone.  Since that morning in the wind-shelter he had decided to take no more risks.  Alarming symptoms had not been wanting to indicate the return of a malady from which he never expected to suffer again.  The grand affair with the Lady Hortense had been a dignified, chronic ailment which he had learned to endure with a becoming air of pensive resignation.  The present attack threatened to be of a much more disturbing character.  It was acute; it responded to no treatment, mental, moral, or physical.  It was like toothache or mumps or chicken-pox, an ignoble, complaint of which one is ashamed, but before which one is helpless.

It was only at table that he found it impossible to maintain toward Bobby that attitude of indifference which he had prescribed for himself.  With the arrival of the new passengers at Honolulu the places had been slightly changed, and now that he found himself seated between Bobby and Andy Black, the temptation to turn his chair slightly toward the former, thus presenting an insolent and forbidding back to Andy, was more than he could resist.  Moreover, it afforded him unlimited satisfaction to know that by the glance of his eye or a whispered half-phrase he could instantly center all her sparkling attention upon himself.

The captain viewed these elusive tete-a-tetes with growing disfavor.  One morning when he was alone at breakfast with Mrs. Weston he unburdened his mind after his own peculiar fashion.

“A seaman has to cultivate three things, my lady, a Nelson eye, a Nelson ear, and a Nelson nose.  I’ve got ’em all.”

Mrs. Weston smiled with, flattering expectancy.

“I don’t claim to know what’s going on in the rest of the world,” he continued significantly, “but you can back your Uncle Ik to know everything that’s happening on board this wagon.”

“What’s happening now?  Do tell me,” said Mrs. Weston, leaning forward and almost upsetting the salt in her eagerness.

“An Englishman, a poisonously funny Englishman, is running out of his course.  He’ll hit a reef before long that will knock a hole in his hull.”

“Oh, you mean the Honorable Percival?”

“I do.  And if he’s like the majority of those titled Johnnies, he’s so crooked he can hide behind a corkscrew.”

“O Captain, that’s absurd!  Why, he is one of the most absolutely irreproachable and unapproachable young aristocrats I ever saw.”

“That’s all right.  I don’t tie up to the British aristocracy, nor any other foreign nobility.  Besides, what headway will I make by steering that girl of mine off one shoal to land her on another?”

“Was the Wyoming affair quite out of the question?”

“Oh, Hal Ford is a good-enough chap, but he’s a perfect kid.  They are both too young to know what they want.  Besides, I am not going to have her drop anchor on a ranch for the rest of her days.  I’ll send her up to ’Frisco to school first.  That’s what the row was about before she left home.  The little minx defied me, so I picked her up and brought her with me out to Hong-Kong.”