What can we do?
Captain Coke simply swept aside my first attempt to speak plainly to him.

But, make no mistake--he knows that I heard his very words, and there is something in his manner, a curious sort of quiet confidence, that frightens me." After that, neither spoke during many minutes.

The _Andromeda_ jogged along steadily south by west, and the threshing of the propeller beat time to the placid hum of her engines.

The sturdy old ship could seemingly go on in that humdrum way forever, forging ahead through the living waters, marking her track with a golden furrow.
"That is a very serious thing you have told me, Miss Yorke," muttered Hozier at last, not without a backward glance at the sailor in the wheel-house to assure himself that the man could not, by any chance, overhear their conversation.
"But it is true--dreadfully true," said Iris, clasping her hands together and resting them on the high railing of the bridge.
"It is all the more serious inasmuch as we are helpless," he went on.
"Don't you see how impossible it is even to hint at it in any discussion with the man principally concerned?
I want to say this, though--you are in no danger.

There is no ship so safe as one that is picked out for wilful destruction.