He turned and met her eyes. There was a tender smile on his lips.
"So you really believe you will be compelled to marry Mr. Bulmer?" he cried.
"Oh, don't be horrid!" she almost sobbed. "I cuc--cuc--can't help it."
"I have given some thought to the problem myself," he said, for, in truth, he was beginning to be alarmed by her tenacity, though determined not to let her perceive his changed mood. "Curiously enough, I was thinking more of your dilemma than of the signals when we were overhauled by the _Sao Geronimo_ this morning. Odd, isn't it, how things pop into one's mind at the most unexpected moments? While I was coding our explanation that we were putting into Pernambuco for repairs, and that no steam yacht had been sighted between here and the River Plate, I was really trying to imagine what the cruiser's people would have said if I had told them the actual truth."
His apparent gravity drew the girl's thoughts for an instant from contemplating her own unhappiness.
"How could you have done that?" she asked. "We are going there to suit Senhor De Sylva's ends. We have suffered so much already for his sake that we could hardly betray him now."
Hozier spread wide his hands with a fine affectation of amazement.
"I wasn't talking about De Sylva," he cried. "My remarks were strictly confined to the question of your marriage. I know you far too well, Iris, to permit you to go back to Bootle to be lectured and browbeaten by your uncle. I have never seen him, but, from all accounts, he is a rather remarkable person. He likes to have his own way, irrespective of other folks' feelings. I am a good guesser, Iris. I have a pretty fair notion why Coke meant to leave our poor ship's bones on a South American reef. I appreciate exactly how well it would serve Mr. David Verity's interests if his niece married a wealthy old party like Bulmer. By the way how old is Bulmer?"
Even Iris herself smiled then, though her tremulous mirth threatened to dissolve in tears.
"It is very unkind of you to treat me in this manner," she protested.
"But I am trying to help you. I say it is a pity that Bulmer should be a patriarch, because his only hope of marrying you is that I shall die first. Even then he must be prepared to espouse my widow. By the way, is it disrespectful to describe him as a patriarch? Isn't there some proverb about three score years and ten?"