"And her with the fine young husband!" said Mrs. Cardigan in obvious astonishment as she backed to the door.
Uncle John looked at me with laughing eyes: but I could not meet his glance.
The rest of the day is more or less of a blur to me now. Sarah came, with Peter and Wiggles. It was a matter for debate, which of the two last mentioned was the more excited. But it is certain that Peter talked more. His ideas of Cuba were wonderful and strange, and it was only by dint of dire threats of being left on the dock that we finally persuaded him to go to bed.
The following morning, February tenth, with the thermometer flirting with zero, we sailed for Cuba.
Sarah and I had connecting cabins: and I bribed a blonde, friendly steward to let me conceal Wiggles behind locked doors and thus keep him with us. On the other side of me, Dr. Denton was housed with Peter. All the cabins were full of flowers and fruit and books, and I am sure that, although I may have concealed it better, I was quite as excited as Peter and the pup.
It was, they tell me, a rough passage. Somehow, I didn't seem to mind. To lie in a deck-chair, muffled to the eyes, and to watch the ocean seemed all that I wanted in life. I never tired of it. Grey and green and blue, as the fog or the sun caught it, there was never anything as wonderful as my first sight of the sea. I was even glad of the storms that delayed us longer than usual. For, even beyond Cape Hatteras, we had wind, and snow and cold. And then came a day when, little by little, people began to crawl greenly up from their cabins, shed their sweaters, and take an interest in life. Sarah among them. Poor dear, she had succumbed almost before we left the dock! Every dip of the boat, every rising and falling swell was met by her with the gloomy announcement that she wanted to die. Once, when I peered in at her, I found my husband sitting by her berth and answering quite gravely, her innumerable questions as to how they conducted burials at sea. Were they conducted "with decent Christian rites?" she was demanding weakly.
As I walked the deck with him, braced against the salt wind, my hair flying under my fur cap,
"You shouldn't tease Sarah!" I said indignantly.
"Shouldn't I?" he asked, forcibly restraining Peter from going over the rail—shouting, "I see a mermaid, Aunt Mavis!" "Perhaps not. But to the good sailor, seasickness is always a matter, inexplicable and humorous."
"By the way, I'm glad," he continued, "that you've stood the trip so well. It would be a pity," said he pensively, "to have injected into the romance of a honeymoon the very mundane element of mal-de-mer...."