But for my promise to her I should have left the yacht early the following morning. As it was I stayed on, with my mind made up to keep my word. Did I stay because of my promise? Did I stay because I loved her? I do not know. Who can fathom the real motive in such a situation as that? I can only say that I sought Beechman’s society and did my best to take his measure. It had been so long my habit to judge men without regard to my personal feeling about them that, perhaps in spite of myself, I saw this man as he was, not as I should have liked him to be. I found that I had underestimated him. I had been prejudiced by his taking himself too seriously—a form of vanity which I happen particularly to detest. Also his sense of humor was different from mine—a fact that had misled me into thinking he had no sense of humor. I had thought—shall I say hoped?—that I would find him a man she could respect but could not love. I was forced to abandon this idea. So far as a man can judge another for a woman, he could succeed with almost any heart-free woman. I wondered that Mary Kirkwood should be uncertain about him. I might have drawn comfort from her having done so, had I not known how she dreaded making a second mistake.
That day and the next, when I was not with him, she was. I shan’t attempt to tell my emotions. That sort of thing seems absurd to all the world but the one who is suffering. Besides, the fact that I was a married man would alienate the sympathies of all respectable readers. Not that I am yearning for sympathy. Those who have read thus far may have possibly gathered that I am not one of those who live on sympathy and wither and die without it. The only sympathy human beings seem able to give one another, I have discovered, is a species of self-complacent pity; and while it may not be exactly a stone, it is certainly a most inferior quality of bread.
The third morning I sought her out. She made a picture of strong, slim young womanhood to cause the heart—at least, my heart—to ache, as she leaned against the rail in her blue-trimmed white linen dress showing her lovely throat. Said I, avoiding her eyes: “I’m off for the shore, and I wish to report before leaving.”
“Ashore!” she cried. “Why, you were to have gone on to Bar Harbor and back again.”
“Business—always business.”
“I’m disappointed,” said she, and I saw with a furtive glance that her face had quite lost its brightness.
“I’m glad of that, at least,” said I with a successful enough attempt at lightness; for, as I have never been the sort of man in whom women expect to find sentimentalism, signs of embarrassment or other agitation would be attributed to any other source before the heart.
“I’ve lost interest in the trip,” she declared.
I forced a smile. “Beechman isn’t going.”
“Oh, that’s different,” said she, with a certain frank impatience. “You’re the one person I can really talk to.... Can’t you stay?”