It was too cold to stand still, so Dick joined the steady march round the deck, taken by the few passengers who were about. Turning a corner presently he almost ran into someone coming rapidly in the opposite direction--Merle Warner, with her shock of hair flying in the wind, and her hands digging deeply into the pockets of a rough blue serge overcoat.
"Can't you look where you're goin', silly," she demanded.
"Didn't see you," Dick responded cheerfully. He had had ideas of apologising, but they vanished hurriedly. They glared at each other.
"He wasn't when I left," Dick said. "Don't think he meant to be, either, by the way he was snoring."
"Oh, doesn't he?" returned the bewildered Dick. "Well, you go down to the cabin and listen, that's all, if you don't believe me."
"I don't need to go--I know he doesn't," she said loftily. "I expect you were snoring yourself, and thought it was my daddy. I think he's jolly good to let you sleep in his cabin."
The amazing effrontery of this made Dick gasp.
"Well--you have a nerve!" he said. "His cabin, indeed. I like that. It's mine just as much."
"No it isn't---my daddy had it before you came."
"Well, we've paid for half, anyhow," said Dick, practically. "And even if your father is big, he can't sleep in two bunks."
"I don't care--you're just a horrid little nuisance, getting into a gentleman's cabin," declared Merle, endeavouring to tilt a rather snub nose.
The speech was meant to crush--as Dick remarked, later, to his mother, it might have been employed in describing a cockroach; but it had the wrong effect on Dick. He broke into a shout of laughter.
"I say," he cried, "it's as good as a play to hear you talk. You weren't behind the door when they served out bad tempers, anyhow, were you?"
It was ordinary schoolboy repartee, but it reduced Merle to impotent fury. She glared at him, speechless, her face flushing from brow to chin; and just then a friendly, boisterous presence swung round the corner.
"Hullo, children." The doctor greeted them cheerily. "Out for an early walk, eh?" Something in their demeanour made him look more keenly. "Why, I believe you're quarrelling! Fie now, for shame."
"I am," Merle exploded. "He's just a beastly little boy."