In accepting Captain Forbes’s invitation to supper Dorothy had taken it for granted that the other two survivors of the Queen were included, and was somewhat startled to find that they were not.
“Gallegher insisted on your friends eating with him,” explained Forbes, with a smile. “He declared that I might have the best, but that I shouldn’t hog everything, and I had to give in.”
Dorothy accepted the explanation, but her heart beat anxiously. Nor was her anxiety lessened by Captain Forbes’s attitude. Had she not been warned of his probable designs, she might have passed over his behavior as merely the would-be gallantry of an uncultivated man, and even then would have found it sufficiently offensive. But, in view of all she had been told, its import quickly became portentous. Between extr
