“What a wonderful evening!” Claire exclaimed delightedly. “And now we are going to dance!”
The orchestra welcomed them back again with kindly smiles. The lanterns which enclosed the little space of deck were like fairy lights. The music streamed out to them, even its ordinary melodies somehow beautified by their own sense of well-being and the glamour of their surroundings. Claire danced from pure love of graceful movement, from that age-long impulse of rhythm which passes behind history into legend; Gregory, a born athlete and light-footed as an Indian, suffering nothing from his ignorance of the more modern steps. Once or twice they rested, but always impatiently, always with their senses tingling with the joy of rhythmical motion. It was not until the end of the programme that Claire realised suddenly that her companion had been dancing during the last few minutes with unusual stiffness. He was pale and breathing more quickly than usual.
“How selfish of me!” she exclaimed. “Of course you are tired! Let us sit out for a few minutes—somewhere where the music doesn’t haunt us.”
They found two chairs in a retired corner. Gregory seemed to have thrown off his reserves, to have become once more fluent and discoursive. His voice, lowered because of occasional promenaders, had developed an almost passionate timbre. There was a light in his eyes which half puzzled, half thrilled her. His hands sought her fingers underneath the rug which they shared. She suffered him to hold them for a moment before she drew them gently away.
“I have never forgotten,” he told her, “how I saw you first. You came into that crazy old warehouse with its piles of silks and rugs and carpets, and shelves of jade and china, and its quaint odour, the perfume of China and the East. You threaded your way through that group of Chinamen in that spotless white dress of yours, in the hat with the yellow flowers, like something fresh and sweet from a new world—from a world where the sun didn’t bake and shrivel everything to dust, or those dank, humid mists make slime of the ground underneath.”
She laughed softly.
“I think the poetry of this afternoon is lingering in your brain,” she said. “Still, I dare say it was strange to see an American girl with a New York frock amongst all that medley. You must have thought our little house stranger yet. Can you imagine my uncle, surrounded with all those beautiful things, living between bare walls and with oil-cloth upon the floor, and—am I very greedy—with such a terrible cook? Are you shocked at me for my materialism? You know I never pretended to be anything else. I love life as it comes to me day by day, with just the things it brings.”
“And I love life as I find it now,” he whispered. “It seems too wonderful to think that you too are on your way to England, and that we’re going to be almost neighbours.”
“But you are never at home,” she reminded him, with a smile.
“I’ve had nothing to keep me at home,” he rejoined. “In the future it may be different. Already I begin to feel that my love of wandering is finished.”