“It’s out of the question to let her betray her father, and then run away! Besides, we don’t know enough, and they mightn’t believe us. It’s a cowardly course, however you look at it.”
“Oh! that settles it,” I answered, hastily. “Now I want to go back over the facts. When did you first see her?”
“She wasn’t in the saloon the night before?”
“You would have gone away next morning if he hadn’t called?”
“He allowed her to persuade you to make that voyage with them?”
“But he sent her below when the pilotage was going on?”
“She said just now, ‘Father said you would be safe.’ What had you been saying to her?”
“It was when I met her on the sand. (By the way, it wasn’t a chance meeting; she had been making inquiries and heard about us from a skipper who had seen the yacht near Wangeroog, and she had been down this way before.) She asked at once about that day, and began apologising, rather awkwardly, you know, for their rudeness in not having waited for me at Cuxhaven. Her father found he must get on to Hamburg at once.”
“But you didn’t go to Cuxhaven; you told her that? What exactly _did_ you tell her? This is important.”
“I was in a fearful fix, not knowing what _he_ had told her. So I said something vague, and then she asked the very question von Brüning did, ‘Wasn’t there a _schrecklich_ sea round the Scharhorn?’
“She didn’t know you took the short cut, then?”
“Yes. He couldn’t possibly have hidden that. She would have known by the look of the sea from the portholes, the shorter time, etc.”
“But when the _Medusa_ hove to and he shouted to you to follow him—didn’t she understand what was happening?”
“No, evidently not. Mind you, she couldn’t possibly have heard what we said, in that weather, from below. I couldn’t cross-question her, but it was clear enough what she thought; namely, that he had hove to for exactly the opposite reason, to say _he_ was taking the short cut, and that I wasn’t to attempt to follow him.”
“That’s why she laid stress on _waiting_ for you at Cuxhaven?”
“Of course; mine would have been the longer passage.”
“None—that I could see. After all, there I was, alive and well.”
“But she was remorseful for having induced you to sail at all that day, and for not having waited to see you arrived safely.”