She hardly knew how to reply. Was this a trap? she asked herself. Slipping her hand over his with a gentle pressure, she said--
"Quite content, if you love me as I must be loved. But why do you speak as if our money should be gone?"
"Because nothing is safe. I think it is--you think it is; but if you found out my secret, why shouldn't the Albino have boxed it out and anticipated us, eh?"
In reality he was not thinking anything of the kind; he was telling himself that the peculiar note in her voice when she referred to the money was not quite what it should have been at the moment of his declaration of love. In spite of her cleverness, it evidenced what lay uppermost in her mind. But he was not going to betray that he had noticed anything.
While they talked the moon rose, and lent a wondrous beauty to the night, sweeping the stars from the sky as if by magic, and turning the sombre water into the likeness of a silver sea. The white and idle canvas threw strange shadows upon the decks, and with the moon's coming a light breeze stole across the surface of the deep, so that the schooner began to draw a little faster through the water. The bo'sun turned on his heel, and came aft to where the other two were standing.
"Nice evenin'," he said, by way of introduction; "the moon there makes it real pleasant on deck, don't it? You'll excuse me, sir, but maybe you don't happen to have a chaw of tobacco about you?"
Veneda gave him a piece, at the same time asking if there was any further sign of sickness forrard. The bos'un did not think so, and casting an eye aloft at the canvas now beginning to fill, and then at the compass card, prepared to air his theory of the malady.
"It's my belief," he said, expectorating vigorously over the side, "that it's no more nor less than pison,--fish-pisoning, I reckon it. Don't you tell me that cholera or Yellow Jack's a-goin' to come aboard this while out o' port--not it! Now, I mind a case once, where a schooner's crew mutinied ten days out from Sydney, their tucker not bein' good enough for 'em forrard. What must they do, when they'd got rid of the old man and the mate overboard, but break open the lazarette, and set to work on all the tinned fish they could lay their hands on!"