"Wait! Please wait!" she was urging. There was a half-imperious,
half-appealing note in her hushed voice.

I stared.

"I'm afraid," I said blankly, "that I don't quite--"

"Some one may suspect. Some one may come," urged this most astonishing
young woman. "Don't you see that--that I'm trusting you to help me?
Won't you stay?"

Wondering if I by any chance looked as stunned as I felt, I bowed
formally, faced about, and waited, both arms on the rail. My ideas as
to my companion had been revolutionized in sixty seconds. I had believed
her a girl with whom I might have grown up, a girl whose brother and
cousins I had probably known at college, a girl that I might have met
at a friend's dinner or at the opera or on a country-club porch if I had
had my luck with me. Now what was I to think her--an escaped lunatic or
something more accountable and therefore worse? If I detest anything,
it is the unconventional, the stagy, the mysterious. Setting my teeth,
I resolved to wait until she concluded her researches; after that,
politely but firmly, I would depart.

And then, beside me, the paper rustled. I heard a little gasp, a tiny
low-drawn sigh. Stealing a glance down, I saw the girl's face shining
whitely in the deck light. Her black lashes fringed her cheeks as her
head bent backward; her eyes were as dark as the water we were slipping
through. I had no idea of speaking, and yet I did speak.