“You mustn’t,” he said, freeing himself.  “Cassie, it’s wrong—­it’s dreadful.  You mustn’t think I love you, because I don’t.”

“Yes, but I am going to make you,” she said with splendid effrontery, looking at herself in the glass and patting her rumpled hair.  “See what you have done to me, you bad boy!”

Had she been older or more sophisticated, Frank would have been shocked at this reversal of the sexes.  But in her self-avowed and unashamed love for him she was more like a child than a woman; and her good-humour and laughter besides seemed somehow to belittle her words and redeem the affair from any seriousness.  Frank tried to stay away, for his conscience pricked him and he did not care to drift into such an unusual and ambiguous relation with Derwent’s handsome daughter.  But Cassie was always on the watch for him and he could not escape from the machine-works without falling into one of her ambushes.  She would carry him off to tea, and he never left without finding himself pledged to return in the evening.  In his loneliness, hopelessness, and desolation he found it dangerously sweet to be thus petted and sought after.  Cassie made no demands of him and acquiesced with apparent cheerfulness in the implication that he loved another woman.  She humbly accepted the little that was left over, and, though she wept many hot tears in secret, outwardly at least she never rebelled or reproached him.  She knew that to do either would be to lose him.  In fact she made it very easy for him to come, and gave up her girlish treasure of affection without any hope of reward.  Frank, by degrees, discovered a wonderful comfort in being with her.  It was balm to his wounds and bruises; and, like someone who had long been out in the cold, he warmed himself, so to speak, before that bright fire, and found himself growing drowsy and contented.

It must not be supposed that all this went on unremarked, or that in the gossip of the yacht Frank and Cassie Derwent did not come in for a considerable share of attention.  It passed from the officers’ mess to the saloon, and Florence bit her lip with anger and jealousy when the joke went round of the chief engineer’s “infatuation.”  In revenge she treated Frank more coldly than ever, and went out of her way to be agreeable to de Souvary, especially when the former was at hand and could be made a spectator of her lover-like glances and a warmth that seemed to transcend the limits of ordinary friendship.  She made herself utterly unhappy and Frank as well.  The only one of the trio to be pleased was the count.

She made no objection when Frank asked her permission to show the ship to Derwent and his daughter.

“You must be sure and introduce me,” she said, with a sparkle of her eyes that Frank was too unpresumptuous to understand.  “They say that she is a raving little beauty and that you are the happy man!”

Frank hurriedly disclaimed the honour.