He had ceased, for an insane moment, to be master of all his senses. But he released her as suddenly as he had seized her, and staggered to the door of the chart-room, turning his back on her and groaning in supreme misery. In that moment of delirium he had insulted his own New England sense of decency and honor. He was afraid to look back at her. With an agony of apprehension he dreaded the sound of her voice. He knew well enough that she was striving to get command of herself, to recover from her utter amazement. He waited. The outrage must have incensed her beyond measure; the silence was prolonged. In the yacht's saloon below a violin sang its very soul out upon the summer night, weaving its plaint into the soft, adagio rippling of a piano's chords. He searched his soul. The music, that distant, mellow phrasing of the call of love, the music had unstrung him. While he paced the bridge before her coming that music had been melting the ice of his natural reserve. But he did not pardon himself because he had acted the fool. He stared at the night framed in the door of the chart-house. Little waves were racing toward him, straight from the moon, on the sea-line, like a flood of new silver pouring from the open door of plenty! But the appealing beauty of that night could not excuse the unconscionable insult he had just offered her. He knew it, and shivered. She had come and leaned close to him over the outspread chart, her breath on his cheek--so close to him that a roving tress of her hair flicked him. But because a sudden fire had leaped from the touch to his brain was no reason for the act by which he had just damned himself as a presumptuous brute. For he, Boyd Mayo, captain of her father's yacht, a hireling, had just paid the same insulting courtship to Alma Marston that a sailor would proffer to an ogling girl on the street. “I'll jump overboard,” he stammered at last. “I'll take myself out of your sight forever.” The ominous silence persisted. “I don't ask you to forgive me. It is not a thing which can be forgiven. Tell them I was insane--and jumped overboard. That will be the truth. I am a lunatic.” He lurched through the door. In that desperate moment, in the whirl of his emotions, there seemed to be no other way out of his horrible predicament. He had grown to love the girl with all the consuming passion of his soul, realizing fully his blind folly at the same time. He had built no false hopes. As to speaking of that love--even betraying it by a glance--he had sheathed himself in the armor of reserved constraint; he had been sure that he sooner would have gone down on his hands and knees and bayed that silver moon from the deck of the yacht _Olenia_ than do what he had just done. “Captain Mayo! Wait!” He waited without turning to look at her. Her voice was not steady, but he could not determine from the tone what her emotions were. “Come back here!”