"She's very beautiful," said Beatrix, as though she were talking about a view or a horse.
"Yes, but better than that," said Franklin. "She's a good sort."
And Beatrix changed the conversation abruptly. "Dear little Brownie! It was very thoughtful of her to insist on riding alone."
"Probably imagined that you and I had plenty to talk about."
"Have we?"
"I suppose so, but I don't know where to begin."
And after that there was silence, for which both of them were glad. This was the first time since leaving the one-eyed place with its frogs and chickens that they had been alone. During the return trip on the Galatea they had both tacitly agreed that no purpose could be served by being together more than was necessary. Beatrix had kept Malcolm at her side consistently. She confided nothing, spoke little and pretended to read one of Jones's novels, keeping her false brilliance for lunch and dinner. Malcolm, glad to believe that for some unfathomable reason his companionship was necessary, stretched himself out in a deck chair and wrote masses of vers libre. When inspiration failed he surreptitiously watched Beatrix and wondered why her eyes were nearly always on the horizon with a wistfulness that worried him. Once or twice it flashed across his mind that she loved his friend and was hiding the fact because of pride, and the excitement of the thought drove every other idea out of his head. But when he saw that her manner to Franklin was cheery and devil-may-care and boyish,—that word seemed right to him,—he dismissed it. "No such luck," he said to himself and went on being quiet when he sensed that she wished for quietude and broke into voluble conversation when it seemed to him that she silently asked him to chatter.
He was a lazy fellow, was Malcolm Fraser, a happy-go-lucky procrastinating young-old man, was this very dear chap, to whom the mere passing of time counted for little so that it passed pleasantly and who seemed to be content to absorb the color of life and revel in the pageantry of Nature. But he had been born a poet and one fine day, when he took himself seriously, ceased to be impressionistic and settled down to work, his God-sent sympathy, the milk of human kindness, of which he was full, and the exquisite imagery that he had been collecting as a bee gathers honey, would put him among the few men whose verse fills a hard world with music and gives back to wounded souls that gift of faith without which life is a hollow and a useless episode.
All the way back Mrs. Larpent had kept to her own room, giving out that she was unwell,—as indeed she was. Her mind was sick, and her body disappointed. Franklin had told her the truth, she was obliged to own, when he said that he loved Beatrix. There was no accounting for tastes and it seemed to her that a man might infinitely better give his heart like a toy to a toy-surfeited child than to this young autocrat.
And so Franklin had found companionship with Captain McLeod, the first officer, and—it was enough to make a cat laugh—with Mrs. Lester Keene. He spent hours trying to make the time pass a little pleasantly for the elderly woman who was, he knew, anxious, frightened and full of conscientious but wholly unnecessary self-reproach. They became good friends before the yacht dropped her anchor off her usual moorings,—even they. One of Mrs. Keene's resolutions was that, in future, she would revise her novel-made opinion of men. That was something to have achieved, had Franklin only known it.