“I wonder if you realize your responsibility?” said Dan.

Virginia did not reply for a moment.  She had not considered this outgrowing phase of her unreserved interest in the young Captain.  So long as he had remained a sort of quiescent protege, there could be no possible harm in her attitude toward him.  Evidently he did not intend so to remain.  There was of course, therefore, nothing to do but reestablish their relations.

“I am afraid my responsibilities are too varied and serious for discussion with—­with any one,” she said at length.

“But where they concern me?”

The girl stepped back slightly, drawing her skirts about her as though recoiling, or, rather, withdrawing from the question.  Yet despite her desire to end the conversation, she really was curious as to his drift; and, besides, he made the most romantic sort of picture as he stood at her side, clean cut, bareheaded, and as self-assured evidently as any man she had ever talked with.  Her wish was to dismiss him with admonition, gently, if plainly to be understood.  But this she could not do just then, and the realization of the fact irritated her.

“I suppose,” she said slowly, “at least I have read that our responsibilities do not cease with one’s friends, but extend, sometimes, even to—­to acquaintances, or to persons, perhaps, whom one does not know.  What have I done or not done that suggested in your mind ideas of my responsibility to you?”

Dan shook the fire from his pipe and smiled.  “Why, you haven’t done a thing or left a thing undone,” he said.  “I thought the humor of my suggestion would strike you as funny, make you laugh.  But it didn’t, so I’ll be serious.  You were decent to me on the Tampico and before; and to-night, I don’t know, but the lights and the music and the night and all seemed to have gone into me, and I wanted to talk to a woman—­to you—­out here in the moonlight, not as we’ve talked before, but as a man and woman who feel pretty much the same way about many things might talk.  This was what I had in mind when I spoke of responsibility.  Not an alarming one, would you say?”

The girl gazing out into the darkness did not speak.

“I wanted you to look down at the harbor there and exclaim over the path the moon is cutting from the horizon to that queer little lighthouse on the point; and I wanted you to talk enthusiastic nonsense about the big, soft stars and the cigarette lights under the trees; and I—­I just wanted to listen and, of course, agree with all you said.”

Dan was smiling as he spoke; but the girl, whose eyes had fallen beneath his steady gaze, was aware that no jest underlay his light words.  By no means could she construe what he had said into impertinence, but she did feel he was presuming upon the kindly attention she had paid him.

“Captain Merrithew,” she said at length, “I have been thinking.  I have been wondering whether I do not think you more inspiring on the bridge of the Tampico, cutting warships in two, or fighting a storm than—­”