"Just now," she said, "I called you a Czar. I was wrong. You're a polished gun-man."
Franklin laughed. He was still drunk with the taste of her lips. "Can't a man kiss his wife on their honeymoon if he feels like it?"
Beatrix put out both hands to keep him away. She was as white as moonlight and her eyes shone like stars.
Ida Larpent almost left her place to catch every word.
"Wife! Thank God you will never be able to call me that."
Franklin went nearer,—within an inch of those two sentinel hands. "I didn't begin calling you that. You chose the word, not I." The way she had of putting him in the wrong always, of making him a brute who had tricked her into this impossible position was mighty difficult to bear.
Holding her breath, amazed and delighted at her sudden and unexpected insight into this marriage business which had always puzzled her, Ida Larpent watched these two young people as a cat watches mice,—the girl standing out against the dark background of sky in all the pride of youth, her bare shoulders outlined by the moonlight; the man, tall, wiry and amazingly vital, bending slightly forward, with his hands clenched; the silence hardly broken by the regular pulse of the engines, the humming of the breeze and the soft swish of the sea.
"This is the end," said Beatrix.
"The end,—how?"
"You will put me ashore."