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.

Margaret bit her lip and her eyes flashed.

'You are quite the most disgustingly brutal person I ever met,' she
said, no longer able to keep down her anger.

'No,' he answered calmly. 'I'm not brutal; I'm only logical. I took a
great deal of trouble to get that book for you because I thought
it would give you pleasure, and it wasn't a particularly legal
transaction by which I got it either. Since you didn't want it, I
wasn't going to let anybody else have the satisfaction of reading it
before it was published, so I just threw it away because it is safer
in the sea than knocking about in my cabin. If you hadn't seen me
throw it overboard you would never have believed that I had. You're
not much given to believing me, anyway. I've noticed that. Are you,
now?'

'Oh, it was not the book!'

Margaret turned from him and made a step forward so that she faced the
sharp wind. It cut her face and she felt that the little pain was
a relief. He came and stood beside her with his hands deep in the
pockets of his overcoat.

'If you think I'm a brute on account of what I told you about
Miss Bamberger,' he said, 'that's not quite fair. I broke off our
engagement because I found out that we were going to make each other
miserable and we should have had to divorce