“That’s just what the man at the shoe store said,” she smiled. “You’re terribly clever!” And when her husband, a look still detached and a shade self-conscious in his round blue eyes, had taken possession of the sheet of paper she had rescued, and had returned to his work at the table, Stella sat meditating. But ever, quaintly, through her reverie, like a whimsical refrain, ran the thread of King’s words: “Double A—with one of those Standish heels....”
Suddenly, as she looked at him, it seemed to Stella that he was an utter stranger—she had never seen him till now—they had not really married and come out here to this mysterious unknown island. Just as abruptly the sensation passed; but the girl still felt in her heart a shiver of nervous excitement, and, in brooding mood, got up and roamed restlessly about the house.
The wind romped outside with nervous starts and stops, each gust strangely impelling her to fresh question and uninvited quandary.
At length, impelled by a wave of romantic tenderness, Stella paused in her roaming and leaned up against her husband, so deeply absorbed in his task—acreage, crops, the problem of irrigation. “Ferd, dear,” she murmured after a little. “Ferd, dear—I keep feeling as though I’d have to wake up. I know it’s foolish of me, but the strangeness doesn’t seem to wear off. Does it ever come over you that way?”
“What?” he muttered, obviously only half conscious she had spoken at all.
Stella caressed her husband’s hair, and, working one little finger into his lapel buttonhole, coaxed: “Ferd—why did we come to Hagen’s Island?”
He looked up at her then, a somewhat troubled expression in his face. “Well,” he said slowly, his lips, so like a tender cupid’s bow, touched with a smile of faint irony, “I guess it was what one would have to call a case of grabbing up the first thing in sight!”
“But—” Her look was a little troubled.
“Oh, I give you my word,” he laughed, “I’d have preferred a good many places to this, despite its very superior cocoanuts and sunsets—some place a trifle less remote. I’m sure I never listened to such a lot of silence all at once in my life! But here was the chance, and it had to be this or—well, something a great deal more prosaic. Unfortunately,” he added, “a man has to work for his living in this hard and unfeeling world!”