II
"Come up on deck!" whispered Charlie in an eager undertone. "There's no one there, and the night is divine."
Molly Erie looked at the strange figure in fancy-dress beside her and laughed aloud. She had not allowed Charlie a tête-à-tête for many days, but she felt that he could scarcely attempt to be sentimental in that costume.
She went with him, therefore, thinking what a pretty girl he would have made.
Charlie led her to the deck-rail. His ridiculous figure was less obtrusively absurd in the dim light. His laughing voice, lowered half-confidently, half-reverently, sounded less inconsequent than was its wont.
Suddenly he turned to her and spoke with wholly unexpected vehemence.
"I can't keep it in," he said. "You've got to know it. Molly, I love you most awfully. You do know it, I believe, without being told. Why do you always run away and hide when I try to speak?"
He spoke quickly, jerkily. She glanced at him with a nervous movement as she drew back. He was not laughing for once, yet she fancied there was the shadow of a smile quivering about his face. Possibly it was an illusion. The dim light made everything indefinite. But the suspicion roused in her in full strength her prejudice against him. She drew back deliberately, and her anger grew from scorn to cruelty during the moments that intervened between his question and her answer.
"You have chosen a very appropriate occasion," she remarked icily at length. "Do you imagine yourself irresistible when playing the fool, I wonder?"
He faced round on her.