“Good-evening, Miss Howland,” said Dan, pausing.

Virginia looked up quickly, and then resumed her former position.

“I don’t know whether I ought to be nice to you or not, Captain Merrithew,” she said.

Something in her voice gave Dan encouragement to make his reply.

“Won’t you please try to be?  In less than four days now you will be ashore—­and then you’ll probably never have any more opportunities.”

The girl settled her chin more deeply into her palms.

“But you have not been nice.  You have been horrid, ever since we left San Blanco.”

Here was a phase of feminine character which Dan, not knowing, had not reckoned upon.  However, he instinctively said the tactful thing.

“I—­I am sorry.  I thought I was pleasing you.”

The girl slowly dragged her chin sidewise along her palms until she faced the Captain.

“Oh, you did!  Has your experience with women taught you that is the best way to please them?”

Dan, now completely at sea, simply regarded her in silence.  Virginia, inwardly triumphant, smiled.

“Now what can you do in four days to atone?”

“I might jump overboard.”

“That would be romantic, but hardly—­”

As the girl was speaking she turned her eyes to the water rushing past the hull, just as a dull, wallowing shape flashed by the bow, assuming form right under her eyes—­a dark, soughing, coughing derelict, moving in the waves spinelessly, like a serpent; black, slimy, repulsive, with broken, hemp-littered masts and rusty chains clanking over the bow.

“Oh!” Virginia jumped back with a startled cry and looked fearfully at her companion.  He was smiling, and intuitively she recognized that it was not a smile of amusement, but of sympathy, reassurance.

“Oh, wasn’t it horrid!”

“Yes, it was not a pretty sight,” replied Dan.  “Derelicts never are.  There are lots of them around here; they travel in currents, sometimes in short orbits, sometimes hundreds of miles in a straight line.”

The terror had not left her eyes, and she glanced astern to where the ugly shape was burying itself in the gloom.  She was an impressionable girl, and that loathsome object, rising as it were out of the bottom of the deep, clanking, sighing, brought to her an epitome of all the fear and mystery of the great, dark, silent waste.  And she looked at the Captain with new interest.  Here was one of the men who brave these things, who brave great big problems, who face the unknown and a future as full of mystery, as fraught with evil possibilities as when the first mariner put out to the Beyond in a boat hollowed from a tree.  In a flash that derelict taught her to read Dan better; gave her a better insight into the look that she sometimes caught in his steely, inscrutable eyes, and the grave lines in his sun-bronzed face.  And in the light of this knowledge her soul went out to this man, this type of man, so strange, so utterly foreign to a girl brought up in an environment where such types do not exist.