He was regarding the cheap little picture. It was of her, with the wind breaking against her dress and the sea backing her. It was scarcely dry yet. “For me?”
“Of course. And, before I lose them, here’s your watch and money.”
“And—and that’s why you insisted on my bathing: to get rid of me for a little while so that——”
She cut him short. “Feeding-time. You ask too many questions.”
As they walked to the hotel, she chattered at length of her adventure. “The man who took it, he thought I was an actress. Wanted to know in what show I was playing.—You don’t consider that a compliment?”
“Not much.”
He was only half listening. He was remembering his unworthy suspicion, that she had stolen a respite to court admiration. Perhaps all his suspicions had been equally ill-founded. Perhaps behind each of her inconsideratenesses lay a concealed kindness—a tender forethought. If it had been so in one case, why not in all?
“Sweetly ungrateful,” Vashti had called her; “she feels far more than she’ll ever express—goes out of her way to make people misunderstand her.” And she’d added: “It’s because—— Can’t you guess? She’s afraid to love too much. Her mother got hurt.”
He felt humiliated—unworthy to walk beside her. No wonder she’d smiled at his ideas of love! He’d make it his life’s work, if need be, to teach her what love really meant. He vowed to himself that whatever she did, no matter how compromising the circumstances, for the future he would give her the benefit of the doubt He would never again distrust her. He would keep that pathetically cheap little photograph and gaze at it as a poignant warning.