Page:Ralph Paine--The praying skipper.djvu/103

Rh heroes. Poor old Jack! He looks as if he were chief mourner."

She patted his hand with a motherly air, and the mourner sighed heavily. Evidently she was making a gallant effort to hide her genuine emotion from the alien company. He tried to imitate her lightness of manner as he replied, with a laugh that was a trifle shaky:

"Yes, I have been out of the crew four days, Cynthia, and it seems four years. It was awfully good of you to pick me up, but I don't know whether I am glad or not. Perhaps you ought to have left me alone."

"And why, Mister Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance? Didn't you want to see me?"

There was archness in the query, even a trace of pretty coquetry in her air. Where was the kinship of souls, that wonderful symphony of understanding he had dreamed of as come true? With a fierce onset of earnestness, he confided:

"I wanted to see you more than any one else in the world. I wanted to see you more than I wanted to see my mother.