“You won’t sleep comfortably—­if my estimate of the look of that bunk is correct.  But you’ll be out of the cold.  Come, be sensible, Magda.  You’re not suitably attired for a night watch.  You’d be perished with cold before morning.”

“Well, let us take it in turns, then,” she suggested.  “I’ll sleep four hours and then I’ll keep a look-out while you have a rest.”

“No,” he said quietly.

“Then we’ll both watch,” she asserted.  Through the starlit dark he could just discern her small head turned defiantly away from him.

“Has it occurred to you,” he asked incisively, “what a night spent in the open might mean to you?  Rheumatism is not precisely the kind of thing a dancer wants to cultivate.”

“Well, I’m not going below, anyway.”

She sat down firmly and Quarrington regarded her a moment in silence.

“You baby!” he said at last in an amused voice.

And the next moment she felt herself picked up as easily as though she were in very truth the baby he had called her and carried swiftly down the few steps into the cabin.  The recollection of that day of her accident in the fog, when he had carried her from the wrenched and twisted car into his own house, rushed over her.  Now, as then, she could feel the strength of his arms clasped about her, the masterful purpose of the man that bore her whither he wished regardless of whether she wanted to go or not.

He laid her down on the bunk and, bending over her, kept his hands on her shoulders.

“Now,” he demanded, “are you going to stay there?”

A faint rebellion still stirred within her.

“Supposing I say ’no’!”—­irresolutely.

“I’m not supposing anything so unlikely,” he assured her.  “I’m merely waiting to hear you say ‘yes.’”

She recognised the utter futility of trying to pit her will against the indomitable will of the man beside her.

“Michael, you are a bully!” she protested indignantly, half angry with him.

“Then you’ll stay there?” he persisted.

“You don’t give me much choice”—­twisting her shoulders restlessly beneath his hands.

He laughed a little.

“You haven’t answered me.”

“Well, then—­yes!”

She almost flung the word at him, and instantly she felt him lift his hands from her shoulders and heard his footsteps as he tramped out of the cabin and up on to the deck.  Presently he returned, carrying the blankets which he had wrapped round her earlier in the course of their vigil.  Magda accepted them with becoming docility.

“Thank you, Wise Man,” she said meekly.

He stood looking down at her in the faint moonlight that slanted in through the open door of the cabin, and all at once something in the intentness of his gaze awakened her to a sudden vivid consciousness of the situation—­of the hour and of her absolute aloneness with him.  Their solitude was as complete as though they had been cast on a desert island.