"Were you in danger? Was the Mary wrecked?" she asked, miserably conscious of the unsteadiness of her voice, yet feeling altogether too nervous to remain silent.
"No," he said. "We have had a very easy and prosperous time, though, unfortunately, we lost one of our boats on the way out—the boat picked up by Oily Dave, which has made all the trouble. We fell in with a lot of white porpoises; so the take has been a valuable one, and the men came home very well pleased with the venture: though Nick Jones felt his spirits rather dashed by meeting his wife tricked out in mourning attire, and flying a pennon of widowhood from the back of her bonnet."
Katherine laughed: she could imagine the tragic figure Mrs. Jones must have looked, and the effect the sight would have on the susceptible nerves of a Bay fisherman. Then she said hurriedly: "I shall have great faith in Mrs. Jenkin's judgment after this, although I have wondered how she could be so persistently hopeful in the face of such evidence as we had."
"And you yourself—how did you feel about it? Would it have made any difference to you if I had gone under, dear?" he asked, with a caressing note in his tone that she had never heard there before.
For answer she jerked her head round, staring at the tops of the pine trees, with the blue sky behind them, but seeing nothing and heeding nothing save the world of happiness which had suddenly opened before her astonished eyes.
It seemed a long time before any sound broke the silence save the regular splash of the oars, then Jervis said quietly: "Are you quite sure that you are not afraid to marry a poor man, Katherine?"
She looked at him with only a glance, then asked, a trifle unsteadily: "What do you mean?"
"Well, you might have looked higher, of course. I have told you how miserably poor my people and I have been. Thanks to Mr. Selincourt, things are easier with me now; but there is a streak of modesty in me somewhere, and I have been afraid to ask for what I wanted," he said, with a certain wistfulness of intonation which brought Katherine's glance round again.
"You need not have been afraid," she said softly.
"Because why?" he asked, in the tone of one who meant to be answered.