with candor. “It is my fault—my failing. I know it only too well.”
“My fault is bad manners,” she replied, disarmed by his self-abasement. “I had no business to say it at all.”
“Oh, no,” he urged. “It is delightful to me that you did say it. I could not begin to tell you how good your words sounded in my ears. Honest and wise criticism is what I have not heard before in years. You do not get it in the South; there is flattery for you, and sneering, and praise as much too high as blame is too cruel—but no candid, quiet judgments. Oh, I loved to hear you say that! It was like my brother—my older brother Salvator. He is in America now. He is the only one who always said the truth to me. And I am glad, too, because—because it makes you seem like a friend to me, and I have been so agitated this whole week, so anxious and upset, and all without a soul to talk to, or advise with—and the pressure on me has been so great——”
He let the wandering sentence lose itself in the clamor of the train, and put the rest of his meaning into the glance with which he clung to hers. The appeal for sympathetic kindliness of treatment glowed in his eyes and shone upon his eager face.
She took time for her answer, and when she spoke it was hardly in direct reply. “Your business in England,” she said, as unconcernedly as might be—“it is that, I take it, which causes so much anxiety. Fortunately it is soon to be settled—to-morrow, I think you said.”
“I wish I might tell you about it,” he responded with frank fervency. “I wish it—you cannot imagine how much!”
The look with which she received his words recalled to him her earlier manner. “I’m afraid—” she began, in a measured voice, and then stopped. Intuition helped him to read in her face the coming of a softer mood. Finally she smiled a little. “Really, this is all very quaint,” she said, and the smile crept into her voice. “But the train is slowing down—there is no time now.”
They were indeed moving through the street of a town, at a pace which had been insensibly lowered while they talked. The irregular outlines of docks and boat-slips, overhanging greenish water, revealed themselves between dingy houses covered with signs and posters. At the barriers crossing the streets were clustered groups of philosophic observers, headed by the inevitable young soldier with his hands in the pockets of his red trousers, and flanked by those brown old women in white caps who seem always to be unoccupied, yet mysteriously do everything that is done.
“This is Dieppe, then?” he asked, with a collecting hand put out for his wraps.
The train had halted, and doors were being opened for tickets.
“We sit still, here, and go on to the wharf,” she explained.
“And then to the boat!” he cried. “How long is it?—the voyage on the boat, I mean. Three hours and over! Excellent!”
She laughed outright as she rose, and got together her books and papers.
“I thought you were a Frenchman when I first saw you,” she confided to him over her shoulder. “But no Frenchman at Dieppe ever yet shouted ‘Excellent!’ with his face turned toward the New Haven steamers.”
The mirth in her tone was so welcome to him that he laughed in turn, without any clear idea of her words. He gathered her handbag up along with his own, and when she demurred he offered her gay defiance.
“It is the terrible boldness of a timid person,” he prattled, as he helped her down the steps, “but you must perceive that in the face of it you are quite helpless. Since I was born, I have never really had my own way before. But now I begin to believe in my star. After all, one is not an Englishman for nothing.”
“Oh, it is comparatively easy to be an Englishman in Dieppe,” she made answer.
CHAPTER II
The sky was dappled azure overhead, the water calm and fresh-hued below. When the ship’s company had disposed itself, and the vessel was making way outside, there were numerous long gaps of unpeopled space on the windy side, and to one of these the young couple tacitly bent their steps. They leaned against the rail, standing close together, with their faces lifted to the strong sweet breeze.
Viewed thus side by side, it could be seen that of the two the young man was just perceptibly the taller, but his extreme fragility excused his companion’s conception of him as a small man. On his head he had pulled tight for the voyage a little turban of a cap, which accentuated the foreign note of his features and expression. He was dark of skin and hair, with deep-brown eyes both larger and softer than is common with his sex, even in the South. The face, high and regular in shape, had in repose the careworn effect of maturer years than the boyish figure indicated. In the animation of discussion this face took on, for the most part, the rather somber brilliancy of a strenuous earnestness. Now, as it confronted the stiff Channel wind, it was illumined by the unaccustomed light of a frivolous mood. The ends of his slight mustache were lifted in a continuous smile.
“It is my gayest day for many, many years,” he told her, after a little pause in the talk. They had become great friends in this last half-hour. In the reaction from the questionable restraint of the coupé to the broad, sunlit freedom of the steamer’s deck, the girl had revealed in generous measure a side of her temperament for which he had been unprepared. She had a humorous talent, and, once she had gained a clew to his perceptive capacities in this direction, it had pleased her to make him laugh by droll accounts of her experiences and observations in Paris. She had been there for a fortnight’s holiday, quite by herself, she told him, and there was something in her tone which rendered it impossible for him to ask himself if this was at all unusual among English young ladies. His knowledge of Paris was also that of a stranger, and he followed her whimsical narrative of blunders and odd mistakes with a zest heightened by a recollection of his own.
“When have I laughed so much before?” he cried now. A long sigh, as of surprised relief, followed his words. “Well—I had looked forward to coming in a different spirit to England. With some hopes and a good courage—yes. But with a merry heart—how could I have foretold that? It was my good angel who put that coupé ticket into my head, and so brought me to you. Ah, how angry you were! I see you now, pulling at that door.”
“Ah, well,” she said in extenuation, “how could I know? I never dreamed that the whole coupé was not mine—and when I saw that odious guard opening the door, to force in some wretched little Continental creature—I mean, that was my momentary thought—and naturally I—”
An involuntary sidelong glance of his eyes upward toward the crown of her hat, passed mute comment on her unfinished remark. She bit her lip in self-reproof at sight of the dusky flush on his cheek.
“It is the only un-English thing about me,” he said, with a pathetically proud attempt at a smile. “My father was a tall, big man, and so is my brother Salvator.”
A new consciousness of the susceptibility of this young man to slights and wounds spread in the girl’s mind. It was so cruelly easy to prick his thin skin! But it was correspondingly easy to soothe and charm him—and that was the better part. His character and temperament mapped themselves out before her mind’s eye. She read him as at once innocent and complicated. He could be full of confidence in a stranger, like herself, but his doubts about his own values were distressing. The
