III
Her finger fell out of his buttonhole. “Oh...!” she half cried, and in such an odd, overturned tone that, still smiling in his princely way, he demanded: “You didn’t think I was made of money did you, little lady?”
Hurriedly Stella shook her head, a bit alarmed for just a moment lest she had placed herself in an unfortunate light. Yet somehow she had always more or less associated Ferdinand with at least the romantic abstract idea of money. The illusion had been established upon the occasion of her first glimpse of him, bursting like a bright symbol into her drab life, his hand full of travel guides. Money—not for itself, but the things it could do and the dreams it could realize.... Her returning smile seemed to crack a little, as her eyes, with still their faintly troubled look, met his, then unconsciously avoided them. It was, to some indefinite extent, a moment of readjustment for her. The evening seemed all athrill with intangible revelation....
“Look here,” he said, a suggestion of bravado in his voice, “speaking of Hagen’s Island and the business, you were responsible yourself, Stella, for a whole lot of the soft pedaling.”
“I?” she asked, amazed, wondering at the drift.
His smile possessed elements of dryness. “The Captain believes to this day you knew the essential facts beforehand. But,” and her husband laughingly seized both her cheeks, “after that day you said you liked having everything mysterious—well, I didn’t have the heart to break in on any of your dreams just then....
“I see,” she said, a shade doubtfully. Her cheeks trembled a little where his fingers had pinched.
“The Captain even tried to talk me out of getting married,” pursued King, almost chattily. “The Captain always insisted this was a man’s job. But that was all the good it did! Why you dear little girl,” he went on, his tone warming and deepening to considerable passion, “how could I ever get along without you?”
But somehow those other words of his—those words unconsciously yet so hauntingly impersonal—seemed ringing in her ears instead: “—what it would have been like if I’d come here—alone....”