The steamer made an unseasonably squally and heavy passage of it, and Laura, who had never been intended for a Vikingess, as she expressed it, kept to her stateroom almost throughout the voyage. Louise and Blythe were among the few on board the crowded steamer who did not shrink even once from mess call, which is the test of the born voyager. They kept pace with the most hardened constitutional-takers on deck every day, and were together almost constantly.
Louise Treharne and John Blythe already knew that they loved each other. On board the steamer, and for five days running, rarely out of each other's company, both found that, humanly speaking, they also genuinely liked each other. Even men and women entirely devoted to each other quite commonly develop a certain pettishness often verging upon actual irascibility when they find themselves incessantly in each other's company on board a steamer. Louise and Blythe, despite the unfriendliness of the elements and the consequent discomforts of the passage, both felt quite lost and miserable when they were separated from each other even for short periods during the voyage. Louise, in her inexperience, did not seek to analyze this phenomenon. But Blythe did.
"She is as fine-grained as she is beautiful, Laura," he said to that ever-receptive confidante, when he found himself alone with her for a moment one day toward the end of the voyage. "I have, as of course you know, no particular amount of sweetness of disposition at sea or anywhere else. But, somehow, I have been a marvel of beatific mildness and contentment ever since we left England. There's only one way to account for that. Louise is temperamentally perfect."
"Charming, but wholly wrong," replied Laura. "Louise is magnificently deficient in the thing called 'temperament'—thank Heaven! Did you ever happen to encounter a female who delighted in calling herself a 'woman of temperament,' John Blythe? Then you know how hopelessly impossible a woman of that sort is, considered as a companion for any normal human being of either sex. If Louise had been temperamental—any kind of temperamental—I am certain that you two would be passing each other on deck without even nodding by this time. But the dear is just a sweet girl-woman with a wholesome imagination and human impulses, and I myself, a woman (and a fussy one, too, sometimes!), could live with her forever without a symptom of friction. You are a very lucky rising young legal person. I don't know what I shall do without her."
"Without her—when?" said Blythe, his surprise genuine. "You are going up to the Adirondacks with her, aren't you?"
"To be sure," replied Laura. "I mean that I don't know what I shall do without her when—" She broke off in momentary confusion. "Oh, you are impossibly opaque today, John," she finished, smiling illuminatingly.
"Oh—that!" said Blythe, enlightened, yet a bit rueful.
It was precisely "that" which, as the steamer drew near New York was causing Blythe no little disquietude. He knew that he would miss Louise acutely after the delightful intimacies of the voyage. No word as to their tacit relationship had been spoken by Blythe since they had thus been thrown almost constantly together. A natural delicacy had deterred him from touching upon that subject at a time when Louise was hurrying to the bedside of her mother. But, now that the steamer was less than half a day from New York, he began to draw a desolate picture of his lonesome state when he should bid goodbye to Louise at the station. Her vigil at her mother's bedside might be a protracted one. He remembered, not without a shock of astonishment, that he had never asked Louise to be his wife. When he mentally retraced the path, he found it easy enough to understand why he had not put this question to her. Nevertheless, the fact that she was by no means plighted to him had caused him a vague uneasiness since the beginning of the voyage; and, now that their separation, for an indeterminate period, impended, he found himself swept by a desire to make their mutual understanding—if such, indeed, he thought nervously, Louise really took it to be—more explicit, if not more binding.
It chanced that Louise herself furnished him his opportunity to speak. She had written a wireless message of greeting to her mother, to be transmitted from New York to Saranac, and they watched the operator as he flared the message over the waste of tumbling waters.