"If ever you are in deep despair and can see a field of poppies all glad and aflare under the blaze of the sun----"
She appeared to have forgotten him and to be talking to herself. He too was away amongst the dews and tender sunshine of Ireland. He knew no blazing fields of poppies, but remembered them gay amongst the corn in the long fields.
"Or sunlight on fields of glowing corn," she said softly, "green land growing right down to the blue sea--trees turning to red and gold in the autumn--a bank of purple irises--gilded aloes spiking against the sky."
There was a strange little dreaming silence.
"I never had a grey gown in my life until now," she said suddenly.
Westenra looked pale in the starlight; there seemed almost to be in his skin a tinge of the colour she mentioned. Her words switched him back too suddenly from Ireland to a remembrance of her unwarranted likeness to his dream woman. She had even gone so far as to talk in the way that woman might have done! To pretend that she cared for the things that woman would care for!
"What made you get one now?" He knew not what fatalistic curiosity prompted the question.
"I got several," she said quietly. Her manner was still friendly, but there had come into it a certain graveness that he thought might be intended by way of rebuke, until he heard the end of her sentence. "You will never see me in any other colour on this ship. I am wearing grey as a sort of mourning for my husband."
"I beg your pardon," he said slowly, startled, astounded, and puzzled. A widow! Oh! She could n't be the woman he had dreamed--the whole thing was ridiculous! Grey for mourning? That was new to him. But perhaps the fellow had been dead a long time, and she was just going out of mourning? As if in answer to his thoughts she made another of her curious statements.
"We had been such bitter enemies that I felt it would be hypocritical to go into real mourning for him. But he died a fine death, and in honour of that I thought I might at least absent me awhile from the felicity of bright colour."