“Do!” he begged.  “I am—­I want to be your friend, really!”

“You are supposed to be his,” she reminded him.

He shook his head.

“I am his secretary.  There is no question of friendship between us.  For the rest, I told him that I should speak to you.”

“You have no right to discuss me at all,” she declared vehemently.

“None whatever,” he admitted.  “I have to rely entirely upon your mercy.  This is the truth.  People are thrown together a good deal on a voyage like this.  You and Mr. Wingrave have seen a good deal of one another.  You are a very impressionable woman; he is a singularly cold, unimpressionable man.  You have found his personality attractive.  You fancy—­other things.  Wingrave is not the man you think he is.  He is selfish and entirely without affectionate impulses.  The world has treated him badly, and he has no hesitation in saying that he means to get some part of his own back again.  He does not care for you, he does not care for anyone.  If you should be contemplating anything ridiculous from a mistaken judgment of his character, it is better that you should know the truth.”

The anger had gone.  She was pale again, and her lips were trembling.

“Men seldom know one another,” she said softly.  “You judge from the surface only.”

“Mine is the critical judgment of one who has studied him intimately,” Aynesworth said.  “Yours is the sentimental hope of one fascinated by what she does not understand.  Wingrave is utterly heartless!”

“That,” she answered steadfastly, “I do not believe.”

“You do not because you will not,” he declared.  “I have spoken because I wish to save you from doing what you would repent of for the rest of your days.  You have the one vanity which is common to all women.  You believe that you can change what, believe me, is unchangeable.  To Wingrave, women are less than playthings.  He owes the unhappiness of his life to one, and he would see the whole of her sex suffer without emotion.  He is impregnable to sentiment.  Ask him and I believe that he would admit it!”

She smiled and regarded him with the mild pity of superior knowledge.

“You do not understand Mr. Wingrave,” she remarked.

Aynesworth sighed.  He realized that every word he had spoken had been wasted upon this pale, pretty woman, who sat with her eyes now turned seawards, and the smile still lingering upon her lips.  Studying her for a moment, he realized the danger more acutely than ever before.  The fretfulness seemed to have gone from her face, the weary lines from her mouth.  She had the look of a woman who has come into the knowledge of better things.  And it was Wingrave who had done this!  Aynesworth for the first time frankly hated the man.  Once, as a boy, he had seen a keeper take a rabbit from a trap and dash its brains out against a tree.  The incident flashed then into his mind, only the face of the keeper was the face of Wingrave!