The name "Grace" suited the girl, or rather expressed her. The man stared with hungry eyes. I was sorry for him. Somehow, I seemed to know how he felt. He had an American voice and looked like an American—that good, strong type of American who can hold his own anywhere: not tall, not short, not slim, not stout, not very dark, not very fair; square-jawed, square-shouldered; aggressive-featured, kind-eyed; one rebellious lock of brown hair falling over a white forehead.
"But—I have been running away from you all these months. I've been doing nothing else. I could do nothing else," she reproached him. They had both forgotten me. Besides, I was not obtrusively near.
"Don't I know you've been running away—to my sorrow?" he flung back at her. "I heard of you in the West Indies. I went there to hunt you down. You'd gone. I dashed home. You hadn't come back. I was told—I won't say by whom—that you were in England. I ran over and got on your track yesterday; flashed off to Bath in a fast auto; reached there just as you'd left for Liverpool to sail on this ship. So now I'm here."
She looked up at him, tears on her lashes. "Oh, Rod!" was all she said. It did not need that name to tell me who he was, but eyes and voice told me something more. She was not flirting with him. She was not pretending to wish that he had not come. With all her heart and soul she did wish it, yet—she loved him. I wondered if he knew that, or if not how much he would give to learn it.
"You can't get away from me this time," he said, not truculently, but pleadingly, as if he were afraid she might somehow slip out of his hands. "We'll have five days and a half—I hope six—together. If I can't persuade you in five days and a half——"
"You couldn't in five hundred years and a half! Rod, what do you think of me? Do you suppose I want you to die?"
"Do you suppose I'm afraid?"
"No. But I am—for you. Nothing on this earth can induce me to change my mind. You only make us both miserable by keeping on. Oh, Rod, here comes Aunt Marian! This is her chair."
Roger Odell glanced in the direction the girl's eyes gave him. I did likewise. A woman was coming, a tall woman in brown. A generation ago she would have been middle-aged; in our generation such women are young. She looked about thirty-eight, and so I put her down as ten years older. She was dusky olive, with a narrow face, banded black hair, and a swaying throat: rather a beautiful Leonardo da Vinci sort of woman.
Evidently she was as much astonished to see Odell as the girl had been, but she had a different way of showing it. She did not seem to mind his presence when she got over her surprise. She shook hands and let him put her into her chair, tucking the brown fur rug around her body and under her slim feet. I thought she seemed more Italian than American. She was very agreeable to Odell, in a cool, detached way, but when she inquired if he ought not to be going below to lunch, even a man of his determination was obliged to take the hint. "We are having something brought to us on deck," she explained. "Come back if you like when you have finished."