She felt sure he had seen her watching, and stayed quite still, wondering what he was going to do. Perhaps he would tell the other man. She found herself quickly hoping that he would not. That she was there ought to be their little secret.
All this that was passing through her mind was utterly foreign to any coquetry. Vere had no more feeling of sex in regard to Ruffo than she would have had if she had been a boy herself. The sympathy she felt with him was otherwise founded, deep down in mysteries beyond the mysteries of sex.
Again Ruffo and the man who had not lain down spoke together. But the man did not look up to Vere. He must have looked if his attention had been drawn to the fact that she was there--a little spy upon the men of the sea, considering them from her eminence.
Presently the man moved from his place in the bows. She saw him lift a leg to get over into the stern, treading carefully in order not to trample on his sleeping companions. Then his black figure seemed to shut up like a telescope. He had become one with the dimness in the boat, was no longer detached from it. Only Ruffo was still detached. Was he going to sleep, too?
A certain tenseness came into Vere's body. She kept her eyes, which she had opened very wide, fixed upon the black figure. It remained standing. The head moved. He was certainly looking up. She realized that he was not sleepy, despite that yawn,--that he would like to speak to her--to let her know that he knew she was there.
Perhaps he did not dare to--or, not that, perhaps fishermen's etiquette, already enshrined in his nature, did not permit him to come ashore. The boat was so close to the land that he could step on to it easily.
It was scarcely more than a whisper. But the night was so intensely still that he heard it. Or, if not that, he felt it. His shadow--so it seemed in the shadow of the cliff--flitted out of the boat and disappeared.
He was coming--to have that talk about the sea.
She did not feign surprise when he came up to her.
"So you fish at night?" she said. "I thought the divers for _frutti di mare_ did not do that."
"Signorina, I have been taken into the boat of Mandano Giuseppe."
He spoke rather proudly, and evidently thought she would know of whom he was telling her. "I fish for sarde now."