"Oh, seven or eight years, I should think."
"Well, he likes me best, anyhow," she laughed.
"I dare say," said Ethan, adopting her note; "all ignorant persons do."
"Yes, it's true!" She stopped a moment. "Now, why is that, do you suppose?" she said, with the candid air of a scientific investigator.
"Merely because you have the beau rôle to play," he said, still smiling. "You help them to believe in happiness. I'm apt to verify their worst suspicions."
Ethan left his wife very little alone, and it was strange and pitiful to him—a daily mockery of the human lot—that they should be so often happy, and in spirit closer together in these hours, than they had ever been in their lives. They clung to each other like two lost children, and the days went by in a dream.
They had had three weeks of quite perfect weather. To-day, for the first time since their coming, the sky lowered, the air was heavy. Still, the sun showed his dazzling Californian face at intervals, and Ethan watched the weather signs while he dressed, his heart secretly set upon going off, by-and-by, with Yaffti and Sam for a sail. He must find out discreetly how Val was going to spend the morning.
"What's for to-day?" he said to her at breakfast.
"I've a beautiful plan if the weather behaves," she answered.
They stood at the door of the summer-house after breakfast. Val would leave him every now and then, go to the lattice-window that looked out to sea, and come back with the latest Signal Service report. Her version was so uniformly favorable that Ethan laughed at last.