"You won't sleep _comfortably_--if my estimate of the look of that bunk
is correct. But you'll be out of the cold. Come, be sensible, Magda.
You're not suitably attired for a night watch. You'd be perished with
cold before morning."

"Well, let us take it in turns, then," she suggested. "I'll sleep four
hours and then I'll keep a look-out while you have a rest."

"No," he said quietly.

"Then we'll both watch," she asserted. Through the starlit dark he could
just discern her small head turned defiantly away from him.

"Has it occurred to you," he asked incisively, "what a night spent in
the open might mean to you? Rheumatism is not precisely the kind of
thing a dancer wants to cultivate."

"Well, I'm not going below, anyway."

She sat down firmly and Quarrington regarded her a moment in silence.

"You baby!" he said at last in an amused voice.

And the next moment she felt herself picked up as easily as though she
were in very truth the baby he had called her and carried swiftly
down the few steps into the cabin. The recollection of that day of
her accident in the fog, when he had carried her from the wrenched and
twisted car into his own house, rushed over her. Now, as then, she could
feel the strength of his arms clasped about her, the masterful purpose
of the man that bore her whither he wished regardless of whether she
wanted to go or not.

He laid her down on the bunk and, bending over her, kept his hands on
her shoulders.

"Now," he demanded, "are you going to stay there?"

A faint rebellion still stirred within her.

"Supposing I say 'no'!"--irresolutely.

"I'm not supposing anything so unlikely," he assured her. "I'm merely
waiting to hear you say 'yes.'"

She recognised the utter futility of trying to pit her will against the
indomitable will of the man beside her.

"Michael, you are a bully!" she protested indignantly, half angry with
him.

"Then you'll stay there?" he persisted.

"You don't give me much choice"--twisting her shoulders restlessly
beneath his hands.

He laughed a little.

"You haven't answered me."

"Well, then--yes!"

She almost flung the word at him, and instantly she felt him lift his
hands from her shoulders and heard his footsteps as he tramped out of
the cabin and up on to the deck. Presently he returned, carrying the
blankets which he had wrapped round her earlier in the course of their
vigil. Magda accepted them with becoming docility.

"Thank you, Wise M