“It’s a funny thing,” she answered, “that Dan should have been so misunderstood.  Do you know that he relentlessly conceals his best side?  Down underneath he is the kind of man who could do a fine thing very simply.”

“My dear Mrs. Dan, you surprise me.  It looks to me almost as though you had fallen in love with Dan yourself.”

“Monty,” she said, sharply, “you are as blind as the rest.  Have you never seen that before?  I have played many games, but I have always come back to Dan.  Through them all I have known that he was the only thing possible to me—­the only thing in the least desirable.  It’s a queer muddle that one should be tempted to play with fire even when one is monotonously happy.  I’ve been singed once or twice.  But Dan is a dear and he has always helped me out of a tight place.  He knows.  No one understands better than Dan.  And perhaps if I were less wickedly human, he would not care for me so much.”

Monty listened at first in a sort of a daze, for he had unthinkingly accepted the general opinion of the DeMille situation.  But there were tears in her eyes for a moment, and the tone of her voice was convincing.  It came to him with unpleasant distinctness that he had been all kinds of a fool.  Looking back over his intercourse with her, he realized that the situation had been clear enough all the time.

“How little we know our friends!” he exclaimed, with some bitterness.  And a moment later, “I’ve liked you a great deal, Mrs. Dan, for a long time, but to-night—­well, to-night I am jealous of Dan.”

The “Flitter” saw some rough weather in making the trip across the Bay of Lyons.  She was heading for Nice when an incident occurred that created the first real excitement experienced on the voyage.  A group of passengers in the main saloon was discussing, more or less stealthily, Monty’s “misdemeanors,” when Reggy Vanderpool sauntered lazily in, his face displaying the only sign of interest it had shown in days.

“Funny predicament I was just in,” he drawled.  “I want to ask what a fellow should have done under the circumstances.”

“I’d have refused the girl,” observed “Rip” Van Winkle, laconically.

“Girl had nothing to do with it, old chap,” went on Reggy, dropping into a chair.  “Fellow fell overboard a little while ago,” he went on, calmly.  There was a chorus of cries and Brewster was forgotten for a time.  “One of the sailors, you know.  He was doing something in the rigging near where I was standing.  Puff! off he went into the sea, and there he was puttering around in the water.”

“Oh, the poor fellow,” cried Miss Valentine.