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Rh doubt that, for some reason, she expected him to propose to her, which it seemed he had already, in one of those confounded extra minutes, been unprincipled enough to do! Now she had gone to inform her father, the Judge, and he would have the disagreeable task of disabusing them before long!

At this point he started, believing that he was visited by an apparition; for a cabin-door opened, and Miss Davenport came out and stood before him.

But she was so obviously flesh and blood—and so dry—that he soon saw that all his anxiety on her account had been superfluous.

"Then you—you didn't jump overboard after all?" he faltered, divided between relief and annoyance at having been made to come back, as it were, on false pretenses.

"You know who prevented me, and by what arguments!" she said, in a low strained voice.

"Do I?" he said, helplessly.

"Who should, if you do not? Did not you implore me not to leave you, and declare that, if I would only have courage and wait, we should be happy even yet? And I did wait.