"Do you know," he said, "you are the most matter-of-fact being I have ever known?"
She turned toward him with raised brows. "Am I? I suppose so, compared to you."
"No other woman living," he returned, "could keep such orderly habits with such a disturbed mind." And his eyes added: "For your mind is horribly disturbed, you can't deny it!"
"I guess it was my training. If you could have known my parents and our way of living! Everything in such perfect order. Even our ideas pigeonholed."
"It's deeper than that. It's in your New England blood. It's a protective spirit guarding you, eh?"
"Possibly. Otherwise I might have gone mad among you."
"Never! Nothing would send you off your head. In spite of your scholastic forebears, I seem to see in you the spirit of some grim-lipped sea captain. His hands on the wheel, consulting the barometer, making entries in the log, while the blooming tempest raged and the bally mast broke and the blinking timbers shivered and the perishing rudder got out of commission. I can hear him saying to the mate: 'Have you made out the laundry list?'—while the heavens split! And taking time to stick a stamp on the brow of the cabin-boy so that his body might be identified when it was washed ashore."
Alayne began to laugh.
"How ridiculous you are!" she said.
"Tell me the truth, don't you feel that old fellow's chill blood in your veins?"
"I feel it boiling sometimes. My great-great-grandfather was a Dutch sea captain."
"Splendid! I knew you had something like that somewhere. Now if only he had been a Spanish sea captain, how we might have got on together!"
She made no response, but began to take things from a bureau drawer and lay them carefully in the tray of her trunk.
"I wish I could help you," he said, almost plaintively. "Do something for you."
