ps and looked up. There was
a faint color in her cheeks, and her pretty brown hair was slightly
disheveled from the hasty removal of the bonnet.

"Father's very particular about strangers being on this deck," she said
a little sharply.

"Oh--ah--I'm sorry I intruded."

"I--I--thought I'd tell you," said Rosey, frightened by her boldness
into a feeble anti-climax.

"Thank you."

She came back slowly to the galley and picked up the unfortunate bonnet
with a slight sense of remorse. Why should she feel angry with her
poor father's unhappy offering? And what business had this strange
young man to use the ship so familiarly? Yet she was vaguely conscious
that she and her father, with all their love and their domestic
experience of it, lacked a certain instinctive ease in its possession
that the half indifferent stranger had shown on first treading its
deck. She walked to the hatchway and examined it with a new interest.
Succeeding in lifting the hatch, she gazed at the lower deck. As she
already knew the ladder had long since been removed to make room for
one of the partitions, the only way the stranger could have reached it
was by leaping to one of the rings. To make sure of this she let
herself down holding on to the rings, and dropped a couple of feet to
the deck below. She was in the narrow passage her father had
penetrated the previous night. Before her was the door leading to de
Ferrieres's loft, always locked. It was silent within; it was the hour
when the old Frenchman made his habitual promenade in the city. But
the light from the newly-opened hatch allowed her to see more of the
mysterious recesses of the forward bulkhead than she had known before,
and she was startled by observing another yawning hatch-way at her feet
from which the closely-fitting door had been lifted, and which the new
lodger had evidently forgotten to close again. The young girl stooped
down and peered cautiously into the black abyss. Nothing was to be
seen, nothing heard but the distant gurgle and click of water in some
remoter depth. She replaced the hatch and returned by way of the
passage to the cabin.

When her father came home that night she briefly recounted the
interview with the new lodger, and her discovery of his curiosity. She
did this with a possible increase of her usual shyness and abstraction,
and apparently more as a duty than a colloquial recreation. But it
pleased Mr. Nott also to give it more than his us