Charlotte worried over the wretched entanglement all day, and was so distrait and absent-minded that her aunt remarked it, naming it malaria and prescribing quinine. Whereat Charlotte dissembled and put on a mask of cheerfulness, keeping it on until after the evening meal and her aunt's early retiring. But when she was released, she was glad enough to go out on the promenade just forward of the starboard paddle-box, where there were no after-dinner loungers, to be alone with her problem and free to plunge once more into its intricacies.
It was possibly ten minutes later, while she stood leaning against a stanchion and watching the lights of a distant town rise out of the watery horizon ahead, that chance, the final arbiter in so many human involvements, led her quickly into the valley of decision. She heard a man's step on the steeply pitched stair leading down from the hurricane-deck. Before she could turn away he was confronting her; the man whose name on the _Belle Julie's_ crew roster was John Wesley Gavitt.
Griswold's appearance was less fortuitous than it seemed to be. As a reward of merit for having saved the mate's life, he had been told off to serve temporarily as man-of-all-work for the day pilot, who chanced to be without a steersman. His watch in the pilot-house was over, and he was on his way to the crew's quarters below when he stumbled upon Miss Farnham. Mindful of his earlier slip, he passed her as if she had been invisible. She let him go until her opportunity was all but lost; then, plucking courage out of the heart of desperation, she spoke.
"One moment, if you please; I--I want to ask you something," she faltered; and he wheeled obediently and faced her.
Followed a pause, inevitable, but none the less awkward for the one who was responsible. Griswold felt, rather than saw, her embarrassment, and was generous enough to try to help her.
"I think I know what you wish to say: you are quite at liberty to say it," he offered, when the pause had grown into an obstacle which she seemed powerless to surmount.
"Do you? I have been hoping you wouldn't," was the quick rejoinder. Then: "Will you tell me at what time you joined the crew of the _Belle Julie_?"
The question did not surprise him, nor did he attempt to evade it.