Beneath the folded V of filmy lace on April's bosom her heart was beating passionately, and the rose-wreathed hat fortunately drooped enough to hide the tears of mortification that filled her eyes. _Her_ name to be parodied and bandied about the ship on men's lips! A poor thing, but her own! One that for all her ups and downs she had striven and contrived to keep untarnished. How dared Diana Vernilands do this thing to her? What foolishness had she herself been guilty of to put it in another's power to thus injure her?
Her eyes were so blurred with tears that she did not notice at what particular moment another occupant had usurped the chair of Major Sarle. It was a man this time. April hastily seized a book and began to read. He must have stolen up with the silence of a tiger, and he reminded her of tigers somehow, though she could not quite tell why, except that he was curiously powerful and graceful looking. His hair, which grew in a thick short mat, was strongly sprinkled with silver, but his skin, though brick-red, was unlined. She judged him to be a sailor-man, for he had the clear and innocent eye of one who has looked long on great spaces. These were her conclusions, made while diligently reading her book. He, too, was busy reading in the same fashion, but, manlike, was slower in his deductions. By the time she had finished with his hair he had not got much further than her charming ankles. Certainly, he had ascertained that she was a pretty woman before he took possession of his chair, but that was merely instinct, the fulfilling of a human law. Detail, like destruction, was to come after. He lingered over the first detail. They were such very pretty ankles. It did not seem right that they should be resting on the hard deck instead of on a canvas foot-rest. He remembered that his own chair had a foot-rest, but it was in his cabin. Should he go and fetch it? Dared he offer it to her? He was on hail-fellow-well-met terms with lions and tigers, as April had curiously divined, but having enjoyed fewer encounters with women, was slightly shy of them. However, being naturally courageous, he might presently have been observed emerging from a deck cabin with a canvas foot-rest in his hand, and it was only the natural sequence of events that while attempting to hitch it on his chair his guileless gaze should discover that April's feet were without support. He looked so shy and kind for such a sun-bitten, weather-hardened creature, that she had no heart to refuse the friendly offer, even had she felt the inclination. Besides, the advances made to her in the rôle of Lady Diana were very different to those she had so often been obliged to repulse as April Poole.