Captain Ross planted the box on Olwen's lap.
"Don't," she laughed shyly. "I shall eat them all up."
"I guess you're meant to," he said shortly. "I got them for you in Bordeaux."
"For me?"
"Sure. I wanted to see if you'd eat candies, after what you said the other day to me in the lounge."
Through the soft noises of the water Olwen's soft voice took up "What I said?"
"Yes—when you said, 'Who wants candy?'"
"Oh, that," said Olwen, looking down at the green lambent water of which the rippling light beat up, soft and magical upon a face whose young curves could have dared a harsher radiance. She then looked back across the lagoon towards the big block of the hotel, picked out against the pale sky. She also glanced to her right, at the sand dunes that barricaded the waters of the Baissin from those of Biscay Bay, and at the lighthouse, winking white and red. She looked, in fact, anywhere but at Captain Ross, sitting so close beside her in that boat.
She was bathed in such a rapturous dream of moonlight and phosphorescence and rosy clouds and proximity that she was afraid to look at him. Fear lest he might read a confession in her eyes did for her what wisdom itself might have prompted.
A sophisticated woman in Simla, for example, had once told Mrs. Cartwright that she found no variation of the Glad Eye more successful with some men than the glance withheld. How dogmatically would this have been combated by Captain Ross! More than once had this expert in Woman's Ways affirmed, "If there's a woman on this airrrrth that I've no use for, it's the woman who looks away when I'm speaking to her. I don't dawdle talking to a woman who doesn't look at ME all the time——"