CHAPTER XVII
She came to a stop and sat looking out at the phosphorescent sea and the star-filled skies. Farquaharson leaned forward, his words coming brokenly and in a heavy misery of embarrassment.
"Marian, I have recognized the new you: I've seen the splendid development and fulfilment of you. It's only that ... that—" He broke off and began over impetuously. "I happened to fall in love with—Conscience before I met you. Of course, that's quite hopeless now ... but it seems permanent." He was struggling with a diffidence which, in such circumstances, a man must have been very callous to have escaped. On the lips of his characters, in fiction, words flowed with an ease of dialogue and broke often into epigram. Now they eluded him, leaving him in confusion. The situation was one for which he found himself unprepared. "I doubt if I shall ever feel otherwise—about her," he went on somewhat flounderingly. "You and she are women of almost opposite types in a way and yet—yet I've been realizing while you talked, that in many respects you are alike."
Marian's lips twisted themselves into a smile, stiff with tension of spirit, but a whimsical irony tinged her voice.
"The Colonel's lady and Rose O'Grady
Are sisters under their skins,
I suppose we have that kinship, Stuart."
The man's hands closed into a tight grip on the arms of his steamer chair. In his eyes were regret and sincerity, but his words came with the firmness of resolve:
"I have, as you say, been dense," he declared, speaking now in even sentences that had ceased to break disjointedly. "I haven't even done you the justice of recognizing your more genuine self. You spoke of drawing me into the web of your troubles—but you didn't say the thing which you might have mentioned. I was also an adult of supposedly human intelligence. I should have foreseen the dangers of even so innocent an affair as was ours. I should have protected you."
"Against myself?" she inquired.