Andy waited a moment. “What news from the Corinthian?” he asked carelessly.
“She’s about caught up with us now, and is going right on. She’s under special orders to hurry, you know. They certainly mean to do things to that poor suffragette girl, Roberta Leigh. You know——”
Andy was favored with confidential communications picked up by the Cumberland’s wireless. Not to show too great interest, he soon moved away. Roberta, if she was to respond to his instructions, soon would come on deck. Thus far, by keeping strictly to her cabin since he had brought her on shipboard, she had obeyed him; it had been a highly unusual experience.
Since she was six and he seven, and their parents had built big country places in Connecticut side by side, he and Roberta had been opponents, rivals, defiers of the daring of each other. As children they had secretly risked their necks on the same dangerous horses, jumped from the same high windows, climbed the same trees. What she lacked in strength, she made up for a time in superior lightness and agility; then slowly but surely the handicap of her skirts, which had to be let down, told against her. No further refinement of skill in her short strokes at golf made up his increasing advantage in the long drives; and she was confined still to tennis when he broke in at polo. Then motor racing and flying came to him; her only sufficient retort was taking to suffragettism as committed in England. He was more than half aware that it was his spring exploits with his last wrecked monoplane which had hurried her to England; but, till he had happened across those pleasing paragraphs in the quarterly review, he had not dared to think that she had acted in different spirit toward him than after he first greeted her over the garden gate:
“Hello! What’s your name? Bobs? Huh! Girl tryin’ to make out you’re a boy!”
“What if I am a girl? Bet anything I can stump you!”
Was it just possible that, as his lost and lamented quarterly review claimed, her last acts had been in only false defiance of him—“the pseudo defiance of man by woman which, from the earliest times, has been employed by woman to attract man.”
He had believed that he had followed her to England with no feeling more akin to love than when, long before, he used to swim out after her to bring her back when she struck too far from the shore, and when she, not needing his help, swam easily back, teasing him. But this time she had needed his help; and since the incredible, unique, delicious moments of her clinging and appealing to him and his feeling her soft and weak and dependent in his arms, he was certain of very different sensations toward her. For those few moments, at least, she was changed toward him; then had followed their precipitate flight to Glasgow and their days of separation while she kept to her cabin on the ship. Had the change endured with her? He paced anxiously, impatiently, up and down awaiting her appearance.
A laugh of amusement, gently raillerous, brought him about. Roberta lay in a steamer chair, reclining comfortably in the Scotch plaid ulster he had bought for her at Glasgow, and with her wavy brown hair caught up under the tam-o’-shanter also there purchased by him. Her cheeks, in contrast with the pallid people in the distant chairs, were ruddy, and her laughing lips full and red.
“You’re a convincing-looking invalid for having been confined to your cabin since we left Scotland,” he greeted her instinctively in their old, accustomed manner, to which she had returned. He dropped into one of the empty chairs near her. “I suppose you were dressed when you got my note?”