One day Aspasia had suddenly attacked her aunt upon the subject of her black garb, crying, with her noted heedlessness:
"I declare, any one would think you were in mourning."
Lady Gerardine shifted her distant gaze from the far horizon to Aspasia's countenance, and her lips moved but made no sound. In her heart she was saying:
"How else should I clothe myself, when I am travelling with my dead?"
Almost as if he read her thought, Bethune sneered as he looked at her, and with difficulty restrained the taunt that rose to his tongue. "Lady Gerardine wears belated weeds!"
Her attitude of hopeless melancholy, her raiment of mourning, irritated him bitterly. Yet, while he looked at her in harshness, he marked the admirable white throat, rising like a flower stem from the dense black of her dress, and found himself wondering whether any shimmer of colour would have become her half so well.
Towards the end of their journey together he was once summoned to speak with her alone. It was about the forthcoming book. Nothing could be more brief, more businesslike than her words, more unemotional than her manner. She asked for his instructions; she discussed, criticised, concurred. It was obvious that, when she chose, her brain could act with quite remarkable clearness. It was also obvious that she had completely capitulated to his wishes; and yet never was victory more savourless.
At the conclusion of this conversation she settled with him that, when she had accomplished her part of the task, she would send for him. And as he withdrew, he felt himself dismissed from her thoughts, except as a mere instrument in what now seemed more her undertaking than his own. At heart he found it increasingly difficult to accept the position with good grace.
After this, during the few days of ship life together left to them, Lady Gerardine seldom admitted him to her company; and thus Raymond was the more thrown with Aspasia. The girl, unconventional by temperament and somewhat set apart by her position of "Governor's niece," unhesitatingly profited by a situation which afforded her unmixed amusement. She was not in love as yet with the Major of Guides. Indeed, she had other and higher ambitions. Aspasia's dream-pictures of herself were ever of a wonderful artist of world-wide celebrity, surrounded by a sea of clapping hands, graciously curtseying her thanks from the side of a Steinway grand.... But Bethune interested her, and there was something piquantly pleasant in being able to awaken that gleam in his cold, light eye, in noticing that the lines of his impassive face relaxed into softness for her alone.
One afternoon, as they sat on deck—the great ship cutting the blue waters of the Adriatic, between the fading of a glorious red and orange sunset and the rising of a thin sickle moon, Aspasia wrapped against the chilly salt airs in some of her aunt's sables, out of which richness the hardy, wild-flower prettiness of her face rose in emphatic contrast—she told him the story of her short life.