“For her?”
“It was on the South Wind my love came to me,” said the other softly; “and it was on the South Wind that she left——”
It was an odd tale to tell in such company, but he told it well.
“Beautiful,” thought Mrs. Burley. Aloud she said a quiet, “Thank you. By ‘left,’ I suppose he meant she died or ran away?”
John Burley looked up with a certain surprise. “We ask for a story,” he said, “and you give us a poem.” He laughed. “You’re in love, Mortimer,” he informed him, “and with my wife probably.”
“Of course I am, sir,” replied the young man gallantly. “A sailor’s heart, you know,” while the face of the woman turned pink, then white. She knew her husband more intimately than Mortimer did, and there was something in his tone, his eyes, his words, she did not like. Harry was an idiot to choose such a tale. An irritated annoyance stirred in her, close upon dislike. “Anyhow, it’s better than horrors,” she said hurriedly.
“Well,” put in her husband, letting forth a minor gust of laughter, “it’s possible, at any rate. Though one’s as crazy as the other.” His meaning was not wholly clear. “If a man really loved,” he added in his blunt fashion, “and was tricked by her, I could almost conceive his——”
“Oh, don’t preach, John, for Heaven’s sake. You’re so dull in the pulpit.” But the interruption only served to emphasize the sentence which, otherwise, might have been passed over.
“Could conceive his finding life so worthless,” persisted the other, “that——” He hesitated. “But there, now, I promised I wouldn’t,” he went on, laughing good-humouredly. Then, suddenly, as though in spite of himself, driven it seemed: “Still, under such conditions, he might show his contempt for human nature and for life by——”
It was a tiny stifled scream that stopped him this time.