“Only a little.”
“Homesick already?”
“It’s nothing.”
“This won’t do!” he exclaimed; and there was a dash of high romance in his tone which had never until now failed to thrill her. Perhaps it thrilled her even now, though she burst into unexpected tears. And the tears loosed her tongue.
“If I could only write letters,” she sobbed. “It seems so terrible to think the only word they’ll have at home for maybe a whole year is the letter Captain Utterbourne took back with him to mail. And even in that,” she rambled wretchedly, “I was so much in the dark—there was so much that had to be left unsaid....”
They had reached the house, and she sat huddled on the doorstep. It was the first time she had really given way to feelings of this sort, and the flood was proportionate. Her husband stood looking down at her, somewhat perplexed.
“Stella, my dear child,” he suggested, “it’s no crime, you know, just because we have to keep a bit still about it. Opium’s a very valuable medical base—in India there’s even a government monopoly. Yet you insist on thinking of it only as a dope.” He laughed.
“Yes, I know,” she sighed. “But I try not to, Ferd. It all seems—I don’t know—so strange sometimes.... And when I learned how they’ve been made to think of you as a kind of supernatural being, Ferd—oh, I don’t know.... I can’t tell you how it made me creep when Tsuda....” Her words groped, hot and half smothered.
King tossed his handsome head and laughed again easily, in his grand way. “You see,” he told her, “it’s the only sure method of getting hold of the Ainu imagination. We have to use something a bit extreme. You mustn’t let a little thing like that disturb you.” His smile was slightly supercilious. “If the world never treated a man any worse than to make a god of him, I for one shouldn’t feel like complaining! But”—and now his look darkened and took on a glint of imperiousness, “I see I’ll have to caution Tsuda to keep his religious prattle to himself. I won’t have him giving you the jim-jams with his ridiculous priest-ideas!”