“I’ve been star-gazing,” said the girl, hastening towards him.
“So’ve I,” grinned Sturgess. “You two girls have the finest eyes I’ve ever-”
His voice trailed away into silence. Maseden dropped to the deck.
“Hang it all!” he muttered, strangely disconsolate. “When Fate took me by the scruff of the neck and married me to one of two sisters, neither of whom I had ever seen, she might have been kind enough, the jade, to tie me to the right one!”
Yet, even to his thinking, Madge and Nina were like as a couple of pins! Being an eminently sensible sort of fellow, he realized in the next breath that Madge might be quite as nice a girl as Nina.
Then the thought struck him that she was purposely making things easier for him by cultivating a friendship with Sturgess. In any case, Sturgess was ob
