Her pact with the Frenchman
was discreditable but smooth words might restrain tongues from wagging
until she could leave the ship. Moreover, the vicissitudes of life in
these later days were not without their effect. She had known what it
was to suffer. She had seen men dying like cattle in the shambles.
The shadow of eternity had fallen so closely that twice during the
preceding night she was rudely awaked by the shrieking fear of a too
vivid dream. These things were not the butterfly flutterings of sunlit
Valparaiso. They were of a more ardent order, and her wings had not
yet recovered from the singeing.
Courtenay, willing to maintain a fiction which evidently gave her
relief, answered lightly that he yet had to earn these compliments, but
he hoped to be able soon to fix a date when everybody might bombard him
with the nicest phrases they could think of, and end the embarrassing
ordeal once for all.
"I went through something of the sort last year on board the
_Florida_," he added. "People insist on regarding it as marvelous that
a man should strive to do his simple duty."
Suddenly it occurred to him that the topic was unpleasantly analogous
to the little French count's cowardly escapades.
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