He lifted a piece of bark from the wood-basket and laid it on the fire. She watched him. Little clouds of steam began to curl up from his clothes. Suddenly she put her hand on his arm. "Paul," she said, "what happened? How did you cross the harbor?"
"Why, the Success went by without stopping, and I took a small boat. I'm going now to change my clothes. When I come back you must lie down; you need some sleep."
"But there wasn't a small boat; the Phantom is away with the tender; there isn't a ship's boat; not any kind of a rowboat on this beach. Unless—Paul, you didn't go in that dugout?"
"Yes," he said lightly, "that's what made me so long. She isn't fleet."
"Fleet." She knew what it meant. He had shared her anxiety and care; it had been one more responsibility thrust upon him; and now, in her extremity, he had risked himself for her child. She could not tell what peril the dugout had lumbered through, but it had been peril in the darkness and that sea. And Philip, her husband, who should have been the one to face it, was doubtless passing the night gaily, in some warm and brilliant room. Oh, the shame of it, the bitterness, the sting of it! A sob broke from her lips. She sank down on a sofa and dropped her face on her arm. "I cannot—bear it," she said. "I—cannot—bear—it."
She did not cry as another woman might; there was no easy rush of tears, but the long pent grief of months, borne silently through weary days and slower nights, welled and found vent to the search of a probe.
A glory from the crimson lamp-shade touched her hair, which was unbound for comfort, and held half its length in two loose braids, as she had worn it when they were children. The strained position of her arm, thrown up over the head of the sofa, pulled back her sleeve, showing its smooth whiteness from below the elbow; it tapered perfectly to the wrist. The slender, shaking figure, her whole attitude, was an unconscious appeal to him, and roused a tumult of feeling; not only resentment against Philip, but immeasurable pity, tenderness for her, out of which rose a sudden and overwhelming desire to take her in his arms and comfort her.
He turned and looked into the fire; the frowning line deepened between his level brows. "Don't make so much of it," he said. "I'm none the worse for a little wetting."
"He turned and looked into the fire."