"And for Mr. Delville?" I teased. "And for Ann Woltor?"
With her hand slapped across her mouth in a gesture of childish dismay, the May Girl stared round at her companions.
"Oh dear—Oh dear—Oh dear!" she stammered. "None of us ever thought once of poor Mr. Delville and Miss Woltor!"
"It's hot eatments and drinkments that you'd better be thinking of now!" I warned them all with real concern. "And blanket-wrappers! And downy quilts! Be off to your rooms and I'll send your lunches up after you! And don't let one of you dare show his drenched face down-stairs again until suppertime!"
Then Allan John and I resumed our reading aloud. We read Longfellow this time, and a page or two of Marcus Aurelius, and half a detective story. And substituted orange juice very mercifully for what had grown to be a somewhat monotonous carousal in malted milk. Allan John seemed very much gratified with the little silver whistle from the shipwreck, and showed quite plainly by various pursings of his strained lips that he was fairly yearning to blow it, but either hadn't the breath, or else wasn't sure that such a procedure would be considered polite. Really by six o'clock I had grown quite fond of Allan John. It was his haunted eyes, I think and the lovely lean line of his cheek. But whether he was animal—vegetable—mineral—Spirituelle—or Intellectuelle, I, myself, was not yet prepared to say.
The supper hour passed fortunately without fresh complications. Everybody came down! Everybody's eyes were like stars! And every body's complexion lashed into sheer gorgeous-ness by the morning's mad buffet of wind and wave! Best of all, no one sneezed.
Our little Bride was a dream again in a very straight, very severe gray velvet frock that sheathed her young suppleness like the suppleness of a younger Crusader. Her regenerated beauty was an object-lesson to all young husbands' pocket- books for all time to come that beauty like love is infinitely more susceptible to bad weather than is either homeliness or hate, and as such must be cherished by a man's brain as well as by his brawn. Paul Brenswick, goodness knows, would never need to choose his Bride's clothes for her. But lusty young beauty-lover that he was by every right of clean heart and clean living, it was up to him to see that his beloved was never financially hampered in her own choosing! A non-extravagant bride, wrecked as his bride had been by the morning's tempest, might not so readily have recovered her magic.
The May Girl, as usual, was like a spray of orchard bloom in some white, frothy, middy blouse sort of effect. With the May Girl's peculiarly fragrant and insouciant type of youthfulness one never noted somehow just what she wore, nor rated one day's mood of loveliness against another. The essential miracle, as of May-time itself, lay merely in the fact that she was here.
Everybody talked, of course, about the shipwreck.
The Bride did not wear her necklace. "It was too ghostly," she felt. But she carried it in her hand and brooded over it with the tender, unshakable conviction that once at least it must have belonged to "another Bride."