She was here for him, then. She hadn't exactly said as much, but she hadn't really given any other good reasons for her presence there, and he hardly believed that she had become so attached to the ship itself during her ten or twenty minutes onboard before that she now had any sort of investment in actually seeing the physical vessel depart.

"We don't actually leave until Sunday," he pointed out, though he was sure she already knew this. "So if you want to see her off, you'll be here a long while." He had meant that as a joke but after he'd said it he wondered whether it had come across that way or whether it had seemed rude. He really wasn't trying to be mean — he wasn't even particularly trying to call her bluff on the reason why she was here, because calling her on it would have opened the door to another awkward discussion of feelings, which he was in no state of mind to navigate.

He took a drink and looked off at some point just past the rail of the ship, so that he wouldn't have to look at her. He decided it was time to change the subject. "Did you do any dancing?" he asked, with a vague hand gesture towards the fiddle music drifting up towards them from the pier. That wasn't exactly what he'd meant to say, he thought. Probably he'd meant to say are you enjoying the party?

There was a chance that what he'd really meant to say was Did you want to dance with me? She'd come here with some motivation along those lines, he imagined, because if she had wanted to forge ahead into another Talk she would have said so already, and she hadn't. Chances were that she had some sort of idea that the two of them would spend the evening together and pretend their last conversation hadn't happened, and maybe they'd go down and dance or maybe they'd just sit and talk, or maybe eventually they'd kiss — something along those lines.

Alfred couldn't honestly say he was opposed to all of that, but he thought that was probably the alcohol talking.