She lifted a wet face up to him in the moonlight.
"The alternative," he said miserably, "would have been better. Instead of the private one, a public examination, Greta Schwarzenberg in prison instead of free—"
"Then she is right!" Nan stood back, clear of the railing, facing him. "You do want to be revenged."
She stood there, with the wind catching at the ends of her chiffon veil, blowing them back over her shoulder, for that instant before she, too, fled from him through the weather door.
CHAPTER XXI
The morning of arrival found every one in the natural state of excitement induced by eight days' anticipation and three thousand miles of progress toward a given goal. Napier's glimpse of Nan, hurrying out of the breakfast-salon by an opposite door as he went in, showed excitement in her, too. Notwithstanding all that had happened, he was determined not to part from her on that note of last night. Anything, the merest commonplace, rather than that, he told himself, unable to strangle a larger hope.
Not in vain he, in his turn, despatched breakfast in short order and went above. There she was on the promenade-deck, her back to him, her face to the faint, still far-off outline of her native land.
In the raw chill of that February morning the prospect appeared anything but welcoming to Napier. It was different for her. In the forefront of her mind she was no doubt waving the Stars and Stripes. But, Napier could have sworn, deep in her heart was the thought of him and a secret planning of one of those "meetings in New York" she had spoken of in the first days. She stood there lightly poised, a little wistful, more than a little alluring. Another man, noting the empty deck, remembering that other sea they had stood by, locked together, would have gone up to her and put an arm about the waiting figure. The scene of pretty confusion and tender yielding, the withdrawal, "Some one is sure to come!" and the hurried arrangement to meet—he saw it all. He wondered afterward what would have happened had he played his part.
When she found him at her side with "Good morning," she turned sharply as though to fly. It was all in the convention.