As she spoke, Dr Whitaker the mulatto passed close by, pacing up and down the quarter-deck for exercise, to get his sea-legs; and as he passed her, he turned his eyes once more mutely upon her with that rapid, timid, quickly shifting glance, the exact opposite of a stare, which yet speaks more certainly than anything else can do an instinctive admiration. Nora’s face flushed again, at least as much with annoyance as with self-consciousness. ‘That horrid man!’ she cried petulantly, with a little angry dash of her hand, almost before he was well out of earshot. ‘How on earth can he have the impertinence to go and look at me in that way, I wonder!’ ‘Oh, don’t, dear!’ Marian whispered, genuinely alarmed lest the mulatto should overhear her. ‘You oughtn’t to speak like that, you know. Of course one feels at once a sort of natural shrinking from black people—one can’t help that, I know—it seems to be innate in one. But one oughtn’t to let them see it themselves at any rate. Respect their feelings, Nora, do, dear, for my sake, I beg of you.’ ‘Oh, it’s all very well for you, Marian,’ Nora answered, quite aloud, and strumming on the deck with her parasol; ‘but for my part, you know, if there’s anything on earth that I can’t endure, it’s a brown man.’ CHAPTER IX. All the way across to St Thomas, endless speculations as to the meaning of the two mysterious telegrams afforded the three passengers chiefly concerned an unusual fund of conversation and plot-interest for an entire voyage. Still, after a while the subject palled a little; and on the second evening out, in calm and beautiful summer twilight weather, they were all sitting in their own folding-chairs on the after-deck, positively free from any doubts or guesses upon the important question, and solely engaged in making the acquaintance of their fellow-passengers. By-and-by, as the shades began to close in, there was a little sound of persuasive language—as when one asks a young lady to sing—at the stern end of the swiftly moving vessel; and then, in a few minutes, somebody in the dusk took a small violin out of a wooden case and began to play a piece of Spohr’s. The ladies turned around their chairs to face the musician, and listened carelessly as he went through the preliminary scraping and twanging which seems to be inseparable from the very nature of the violin as an instrument. Presently, having tightened the pegs to his own perfect satisfaction, the player began to draw his bow rapidly and surely across the strings with the unerring confidence of a practised performer. In two minutes, the hum of conversation had ceased on deck, and all the little world of the _Severn_ was bending forward its head eagerly to catch the liquid notes that floated with such delicious clearness upon the quiet breathless evening air. Instinctively everybody recognised at once the obvious fact that the man in the stern to whom they were all listening was an accomplished and admirable violin-player.