"Not half you needn't," added Smith with a grim chuckle. "When the old man----" he broke off abruptly as the ship's bell struck. "Holy Moses! eight bells already!" he ejaculated, and, rising to his feet, went off to relieve Mr. Dykes.
As the latter descended the companion-ladder after handing over the watch to the second-mate, he paused suddenly before reaching the deck. He was not an imaginative man and had never made a study of beauty except as represented by the female crimps and spongers who infested the various ports he had visited. But for a moment the sight of the girl sitting on the hatch, her beautiful hair softly radiant in the moonlight, and her figure in its close-fitting jersey so strangely alluring in the half-concealment of the shadows, held him spellbound. The splendour of the night, with its star-powdered sky of deepest, limpid blue; the brilliant moon whose beams made an ever-widening track of molten silver with shimmering tints of bronze, across the blue-black waters; the wake of foaming, sparkling iridescence in the steamer's track,--all these things moved him not one jot for he had witnessed them times without number. He saw nothing, in fact, but the girl, sitting with her face resting on her hands, gazing pensively out to sea. Never before had he realised that she was beautiful and intensely feminine despite all her affected masculinity.
"Durned if she don't look like a picture postcard," he murmured ecstatically.
He walked up to the hatch and sat down near her, but she did not turn her head nor show any sign of being aware of his presence. He coughed to attract her attention, but without result; she continued gazing with sad, thoughtful eyes into the distant mingling of crystal blue and glistening silver-grey which marked the junction of sea and sky.
"Say, ain't it a dandy night?" he observed, unable to keep silence any longer.
The girl made no answer, but the remark aroused McPhulach from the reverie into which he, also, had fallen. Rising to his feet, he knocked the ashes out of his pipe and yawned.
"Gin I bide here any langer, I'll be consooming anither pipe o' bacca; so I'll wish ye a verra guid nicht, Miss Fletcher," he said.
"Good-night, McPhulach," answered the girl, who rarely used the prefix "Mr." when addressing her companions.