"Oh!" said the Young Doctor with the most surprising revival of cheerfulness. "Why—why she's gone on down to investigate her new duck blind with the rest of her party. There's a tenor, it seems, who is rather,—well, contenting. You could hardly use any other word with her, she's so awfully inexpressive. Anyway it's a diverting friendship for her, though whether the tenor can hit a high duck as niftily as he can hit a high note, remains of course to be seen."
"S-o?" said Solvei with indifferent interest. "And is the piano well?"
"Oh, fairly well," conceded the Young Doctor. "But if ever I saw a piano that needed a mother's care! I had to board it out, you know?"
"S-o?" crooned Solvei's sweet low voice.
It was astonishing though how soon the sea calmed down after that. At least there was no more spray.
Skirting round at last along the sunny sheltered side of the little island instead of 156splashing boldly up to the regular landing as was her usual custom, it seemed indeed as though Solvei was suddenly trying to feed out serenity to the man before her. The floating gray moss of the live-oak trees was certainly serene, the twitter of birds, the soft, warm drone of insect. Without an interrupting word she drove the boat's nose into a roughly improvised harbor of floating logs and a raft, jumped out upon the raft and beckoned the Young Doctor to follow her.
But at the first soft-padded thud of his foot on the turf it was the Young Doctor himself who broke the vocal silence.
"Oh, but Solvei!" he protested. "You've got to know that you are the only Mrs. Kendrue that I want!"
"S-o?" queried Solvei, glancing back with a vaguely skeptical smile across her blue jersey shoulder.
"Oh, of course," admitted the Young Doc tor, "just right away at the very first I didn't know it perhaps. You were so—so,— well, so sort of unusual," he flushed, "and so awfully independent! About the Adventure and the Little Widow and everything, you 157made it so perfectly plain you didn't need me that it wasn't till you'd actually gone that I half woke up to the fact how much I needed you! Why, Solvei, after you ran away the city was like a gray fog with no light in it, no laughter, no anything! The days were a week long, the nights, a month! Is it any wonder that I should feel as though I'd loved you for almost ever and ever? Why, if it hadn't been for my work, and the knowledge that work and work only could bring me to you—? Oh, I know it's awfully sudden and everything!" he persisted desperately. "But why people prate so everlastingly about 'Love at first sight' and never make any talk at all about 'Love at first absence'! Solvei you've simply got to understand!" he cried out.