Ever since the days of "wet bob" prowess, Julian was at his best, Napier had always thought, on the water. But sailing was the sport he gave his soul to. He forgot his troublesome theories, his quarrel with the world's ordering, and yielded himself with delight to a comradely tussle with the difficulties of navigation, on a rock-bound, "chancy" bit of coast, as he called it.
He looked his best too. The lithe activity of body, the extraordinary quickness of eye, showed the dreaming gone; instead of it, a mastery in alertness. His girlish brown hands, endowed with a steadiness as of steel.
The person who was distinctly not at her best under these conditions was Miss Greta. She had opposed the boating plan as long as she could. The moment she grasped the fact that Nan and Julian, and probably Napier, were going on the water with or without Miss Greta, Miss Greta saw her course with characteristic clarity. She adored sailing! It was only her "sense of responsibility" which had made her hesitate.
Her sense of responsibility, if it was that, went far to spoil her pleasure. She had a curious idea that, though the coast hereabouts was dangerous, the farther out you went the more you tempted fortune. "Those horrchible, rock-bound islands!"
Napier smiled to himself. He did a good deal of covert smiling during those perfect July days, though he didn't pretend to himself that he was specially happy.
The initial reason he gave himself for his state of mind was the breath-taking speed of your inexperienced person, once he is started. While Napier had been giving a secretly humorous welcome to Julian's little distraction, here was that rash youth planning to motor the girl to Abergarry. The only thing, so far as Napier could judge, that prevented Julian from introducing the girl forthwith as his future wife was the trifling circumstance that Sir James and Lady Grant had just telegraphed to say they would be detained a fortnight longer at Bad Nauheim.
There were times when, if Napier had been forced to stand and deliver the reasons for his secret depression, he would have been inclined to say they rose, not out of the fact that Julian was probably going to marry this girl, but out of a growing conviction that she wouldn't "fit in" in the life over here. She was "crude," as Miss Greta had said. And she was too independent; too impulsive; too ... what was it? No repose. You never knew where she'd break out next, either in speech or act. It wasn't so much that what she said was wrong, or that what she did was amiss; only both might be unexpected. She kept you on the jump. No thoroughly nice woman, certainly no wife, should keep you on the jump.
Curiously, to Napier's mind, Julian was fashing himself on the score of the influence which Greta von Schwarzenberg exercised over Nan Ellis. "I tell you," he said one night, "the woman's hold over her is uncanny. Part of the trouble lies in Nan's sense of loyalty. It's a drawbridge and a moat and an army—horse, foot, and dragoons. I can't get past it. It's a thing I haven't so far been able to talk openly to her about. And there's only one other thing of that kind,"—Julian's face was quite beautiful in that moment—"she doesn't know yet—unless she guesses."
"Oh, you haven't said anything yet?"—Napier breathed freer.