“Would you lend me your paper,” she was asking, “for just a moment?  I haven’t seen one since morning; the evening editions were not out when I came on board.”

Her manner was proud, spirited, gracious; she even smiled; but she was frightened.  I could read it in her slight pallor, in the quickening of her breath.

My extra!  What was there in the day’s news that could upset her?  I was nonplussed, but of course I at once extended the sheet.

“Certainly!” I replied politely.  “Pray keep it.”  Lifting my cap a second time, I turned to go.

Her fingers touched my arm.

“Wait!  Please wait!” she was urging.  There was a half-imperious, half-appealing note in her hushed voice.

I stared.

“I’m afraid,” I said blankly, “that I don’t quite—­”

“Some one may suspect.  Some one may come,” urged this most astonishing young woman.  “Don’t you see that—­that I’m trusting you to help me?  Won’t you stay?”

Wondering if I by any chance looked as stunned as I felt, I bowed formally, faced about, and waited, both arms on the rail.  My ideas as to my companion had been revolutionized in sixty seconds.  I had believed her a girl with whom I might have grown up, a girl whose brother and cousins I had probably known at college, a girl that I might have met at a friend’s dinner or at the opera or on a country-club porch if I had had my luck with me.  Now what was I to think her—­an escaped lunatic or something more accountable and therefore worse?  If I detest anything, it is the unconventional, the stagy, the mysterious.  Setting my teeth, I resolved to wait until she concluded her researches; after that, politely but firmly, I would depart.

And then, beside me, the paper rustled.  I heard a little gasp, a tiny low-drawn sigh.  Stealing a glance down, I saw the girl’s face shining whitely in the deck light.  Her black lashes fringed her cheeks as her head bent backward; her eyes were as dark as the water we were slipping through.  I had no idea of speaking, and yet I did speak.

“I am afraid,” I heard myself saying, “that you have had bad news.”

She was struggling for self-control, but her voice wavered.

“Yes,” she agreed; “I am afraid I have.”

“If there is anything I can do—­” I was correct, but reluctant.  How I would bless her if she would go away!

But obviously she did not intend to.  Quite the contrary!

“There is something,” she was murmuring, “that would help me very much.”

There, I had done it!  I was an ass of the common or garden variety, who first resolved to keep out of a queer business and then, because a girl looked bothered, plunged into it up to my ears.  I succeeded in hiding my feelings, in looking wooden.

“Please tell me,” I responded, “what it is.”

“But—­I can’t explain it.”  Her gloved hands tightened on the railing.  “And if I ask without explaining, it will seem so—­so strange.”