"What about coming out on the small launch and having lunch on one of the islands westward?"
Beatrix picked up her bath-robe and swung it round her shoulders. "It sounds too good to be true," she said, without enthusiasm. "Thank you."
Franklin blocked the door. She was in his blood. "Good God," he cried, all out of control, "why don't you smash that damned shell and be yourself all the time?"
She raised her eyebrows and swung a tassel round and round. "You don't like my shell, then?"
"I loathe it!"
"Well, nobody asked you to do anything else, you know."
Her iciness and savoir faire, the fearless way in which she stood up to him, the utter indifference to his opinion one way or the other on any mortal subject crushed his passion as effectively as a snuffer on the flame of a candle. He stood aside to let her pass.
But she had seen the sudden blaze in his eyes. It was not to be missed. She mistook it for the sort of passion that she had unconsciously roused in Sutherland York and used her wits to quell. There had been none of this, to her way of thinking, in the kisses that Franklin had snatched. They were merely to show her that he was owner. She had never conceived it possible that this inarticulate man could love her. He made it too obvious that she fell far short of his ideal. But she had now at last caught the desired glimpse of that side of his character that she had been working to find. He was not then so supremely self-composed as he made himself out to be. He had shown her, in a flash,—and she got this with a great throb of feminine triumph,—that however well he had believed in the truth of his scornful statement as to the huts on the desert island when he had made it, he would lie if he repeated it now.
And with this balm to the wound in her vanity, which had never healed, she passed him. He lived as a man again for the first time since the bedroom incident,—and she liked him for it. She got this too, as she went off to her suite, and it came on top of her determination to fight "fair or unfair," as something of a shock. To begin to like him when she ought to detest him most!—"Good Lord," she said to herself as she dressed to go out in the launch, with greater pains than usual, "what a mass of contradictions you are, my child. What are you really, I wonder?—and how will all this end?"
Franklin went slowly across to the port-side, disheartened and depressed. "What the devil's the use of me? Every time I open my mouth it makes everything more hopeless. I'm as bad as a bull in a china shop. I'd better let her go and chuck the whole blessed thing and, after all, is there any gold to dig out or has it all turned to brass? I'll be hanged if I know."