"You!" She put her hands over her breasts.
"I'm sorry. I thought you were ill." How tame it sounded!
"Ill? Why?"
"It's late and you haven't rung for the stewardess all day. I wondered if anything was the matter. So I came in. That's all. Can I do anything for you?"
"Only—go," she said.
And so he turned and went out and strode forward and stood hatless under the sky. Other stars had come. The line of horizon had become merged into the darkness. The breeze left the taste of salt on his parched lips. The eternal yearning grew in the silence and the call of Nature seemed to echo through the world. Everything that was true and clean and honest in him answered to it. All his dreams as a boy and a youth, vague, unremembered; all the sudden, surprising elations that had swept over him at the sight, perhaps, of a priceless view of open country, the misty interior of an old Cathedral, the appeal of a throbbing melody, took shape and became the lovely body of that sleeping girl. He had never understood so definitely, so conclusively, so permanently, that in Beatrix was the epitome of all his hopes.
She dined in her own room that night and had breakfast sent to her in the morning. Franklin hung about near her stateroom in the hope of seeing her. He could hear her singing as he passed and talking to the little Irish woman, but at twelve o'clock there was still no sign of her on deck. He was just going along to the Captain's room in order to talk and be talked to when the stewardess came and gave him a note. He took it and blushed like a school-boy and carried it down to his own room.
It had no conventional beginning. It plunged straight to the point. "I'm not sulking, which would be human enough, or suffering from shock, which would be reasonable under the circumstances. I'm thinking and weighing things up. I've told the stewardess that I've got neuralgia so that the people of your small kingdom may not run away with the notion that their rulers have had a wordy argument. I may inflict myself upon you for lunch if by that time I have found the way out of my mental maze. If not, you may be alone in all your glory for days,—weeks perhaps."
It ended as abruptly as it began.
Days,—weeks perhaps!