“Aha!” he exclaimed in the doorway of the room they humorously called their parlour.
“I didn’t know anything about it,” laughed the girl, “till I came across it at the very bottom of the trunk. I certainly would never have thought of bringing a calendar! Maud must have slipped it in—she was always raving about that picture—isn’t it beautiful?” Stella laughed derisively, though without bitterness, for the past was all behind her. “It used to hang in the dining room,” she explained. “I guess Maud thought it might look cheerful to us a long way from home. It gives you a sort of feeling of being still in touch with the world, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” he agreed, and, with a faint smile, beheld a large mercantile calendar, a bright-coloured print filling the upper half. The picture showed a sailor just returned to his little home nest after hazardous voyages. All the colours were too gaudy, and the sailor’s dog was absurdly foreshortened; but it was a joyous tableau, within its frame of coiled and knotted ropes; and across the hearthrug, in energetic gold, one read:
Oaks, Ferguson & Whitley,
Ships’ Chandlers
The soft, scented breath of the jungle outside crooned a little through the rustle of palm and fern fronds, just now and then audible; and it stirred the mats at the windows and sometimes made the doors creak hauntingly on their jungle-vine hinges.
“What’s today?” asked King, lighting a cigarette. And he added, with a faint note of restlessness behind the laugh: “Already it’s beginning not to matter much!”
Stella glanced at the calendar gayly. “Today is Thursday—the fourteenth.” Then, clasping her hands with some excitement, she exclaimed: “Why, isn’t that St. Valentine’s Day?”
“By Jove, you’re right, Stella.”
She seemed quite delighted over the discovery, though it was with a trace of seriousness she mused: “Doesn’t it seem strange to think of Valentine’s Day with nobody but ourselves within hundreds of miles who ever heard of St. Valentine?”
She glanced around her at the primitive surroundings. A great, lustrous butterfly with heavy wings alighted on one of the sills and drooped there, poised.