“Nonsense!”
“It may not be nonsense. You are a man of a different world from the country one you found me in. It was only an hour ago we were married, but I can see already that I was perfectly mad and unutterably selfish to let you sacrifice yourself for me. A braver girl—a better girl—wouldn’t have cared what silly society might say. I was wicked to marry you!”
“Tut! tut!”
“I’m perfectly serious—miserably serious.”
“Then I’ll be serious, too. I admit that you and I ought to be different, but we aren’t. I don’t know why it should be so, dear, but we both ‘belong.’ We’re the same sort. You must feel it as well as I.”
All that golden afternoon they sailed, and all the afternoon they talked. Her mind played with a hundred fancies, grave and gay, and Fessenden heard her with delight, and with ever-renewed wonder. She seemed to him a sort of Admirable Crichton, possessing heaven-sent intuition of all that was rare and charming and useful.
At dusk they lowered all sail, let go the anchor, and made the sloop secure for the night.
Then, with his respectful help, Betty cooked the dinner, and served it on a camp-table in the cockpit.
That dinner was Olympian. A sirloin steak, deliciously broiled—“I intend to give you a man’s dinner,” she had declared; French fried potatoes, as hot as the flames they came hissing from; coffee, as clear as amber; and fresh tea-biscuits which one was allowed to dip in Kitty Hawk honey.
When the dinner things had been cleared away, they sat under the stars and watched the lights twinkle here and there from lonely cabins along-shore. Now and then Betty’s fingers strayed over the guitar she had borrowed from the West Wind. The light breeze sighed an answer through the cypress and tamarack trees of the swampy cape near-by.