'I was a good deal cut up myself,' he observed coolly. 'Here's your
book, Madame Cordova.'

'No,' Margaret answered with a little burst of indignation, 'I don't
want it. I won't take it from you!'

'What's the matter now?' asked Mr. Van Torp without the least change
of manner. 'It's your friend Mr. Lushington's latest, you know, and it
won't be out for ten days. I thought you would like to see it, so I
got an advance copy before it was published.'

He held the volume out to her, but she would not even look at it, nor
answer him.

'How you hate me! Don't you, Madame Cordova?'

Margaret still said nothing. She was considering how she could best
get rid of him. If she simply brushed past him and went back to her
chair on the lee side, he would follow her and go on talking to her as
if nothing had happened; and she knew that in that case she would lose
control of herself before Griggs and Miss More.

'Oh, well,' he went on, 'if you don't want the book, I don't. I can't
read novels myself, and I daresay it's trash anyhow.'

Thereupon, with a quick movement of his arm and hand, he sent Mr.
Lushington's latest novel flying over the lee rail, fully thirty feet
away, and it dropped out of sight into the grey waves. He had been a
good baseball pitcher in his youth.