The older man spoke half in jest, but Jacqueline Ralston stared at him in a more critical fashion than she ever had before. Could she have been making a hero in her mind of a man who was no hero at all?
"But I can't understand how a man who has once been in the army could stop being," she remarked slowly.
Her companion shook his head. "No, of course you rich Americans can't understand," he replied. "The fact of the matter was that I did not have money enough to keep up my position. Though I can hardly expect a young American girl with a gold mine at her disposal to realize what a lack of money means."
Jack moved her shoulders impatiently, letting her clear gray eyes rest for the moment upon her companion's profile. He looked a soldier every inch of him and a brave man. Yet what could his confession mean?
"I haven't been a rich American girl always, Captain Madden," she returned. "And I don't know why you think I am one now. But a lack of money would never have made me give up my profession if I cared for it."
It was perfectly self-evident that Jack was feeling a sense of disappointment in her companion. Although they had only known one another for a week, and Captain Madden was so much older, intimacies develop more rapidly aboard ship than anywhere else in the world, except perhaps on a desert island. Jack suddenly realized that she had been giving more thought to her companion's history than there was any reason for doing.
She looked back over her shoulder. Numbers of persons with field glasses in their hands were coming on to the deck.
"Miss Drew and the girls will soon be joining us," she suggested, meaning for Captain Madden to understand that she no longer wished to discuss his personal affairs. "I must go and search for them if they don't come at once. I think I can already see the point of Cape Trafalgar. In a short time we must be entering the Straits of Gibraltar."
The next second Jack started to move away, but a glance from the man at her side held her. It was curious that she, who had never yielded to any one in her life except of her own will, should feel his influence.
"You are only a young girl and I am possibly twice your age," Captain Madden began, "yet our acquaintance aboard ship has been so pleasant that I do not wish to have you misunderstand me. There were other reasons for my leaving the British army, but you may believe this to be the chief one: I am not a good soldier in times of peace. When the Boer war was over, I wanted to be where there was still fighting to be done. My country was weary of war and so I joined the Russians in their war with Japan."
