“Baking before the kitchen fire. She’ll be ready before we are.”
“Well—I had no right. What a chapter of mishaps.” Then he turned upon me with a sudden clap of fierceness. “Why did you ever propose this trip? I tried to dissuade you, and you might have known I was an idiot on the water.”
“My good Duke,” I answered, with a coolness that covered a fine glow of heat, “that don’t sound very gracious. I meant it for a pleasure party, of course. Accidents aren’t matters under human control, you know.”
He struck his knee savagely.
“No,” he muttered, “or I shouldn’t have these.”
Then in a moment the sweetness came back to his face, and he cried with a smile, half-humorous and all pathetic:
“Here’s the value of my philosophy. I’m no more consistent than a Ripley pamphlet and not a quarter so amusing. But—oh, if I had only learned to swim!”
CHAPTER XVII.
A TOUCHING REVELATION.
For nearly four years did I work persistently, striving to redeem my past, at the offices in Great Queen Street. At this period my position was greatly improved, my services estimated at a value that was as honorable to my employer as it was advantageous to me. I had grown to be fairly at peace with myself and more hopeful for the future than I had once deemed it possible that I could ever be.
Not all so, however. The phantom light that had danced before my youthful eyes, danced before them still, no whit subdued in brilliancy. With the change to wider and manlier sentiments that I was conscious of in my own development, I fostered secret hope of a similar growth in Zyp. At 22, I thought, she could hardly remain the irresponsible, bewitching changeling she had been at 17. Womanliness must have blossomed in her, and with it a sense of the right relationship of soul to body. Perhaps even the glamour of mystery that must surround my manner of life had operated as a growing charm with her, and had made me, in her eyes, something of the fascinating figure she always was and would be in mine.