But Ella still looked persistently out to sea.
“The yacht’s quite gone now,” she said in a disconsolate voice, “and with it your twenty thousand pounds. I suppose, from a strictly business point of view, I owe you some compensation.”
“Well, twenty thou is twenty thou,” said Clarence, whose spirits were rising.
Ella raised her hand to her chin reflectively, a little beam of mischief coming into her eyes.
“On the whole,” she said at last musingly, making no further objection to the encroachments of her companion’s arm, “considering that I’m the ugly duckling of the family, perhaps I might have made a worse bargain! And to tell you the truth, Clarence,” she added presently in a gentler voice, with a touch of shyness, when he had made her seal the contract with a kiss for each thousand, “if you had gone your way and I had gone mine after the way you behaved over that yacht, I—I should have missed you awfully!”
The sun was growing hot over the land and over the sea, and a dim white haze seemed to soften the line between blue sky and blue ocean, as they stood still side by side under the tower of old Maker Church, savouring of the strange sweetness of having crowned an old romance and laid the foundation of a new one with the fitting up of the yacht Scheherazade.
Away over the quiet sea the little yacht steamed, the red-gold evening sunlight bathing her decks and cresting with jewels each tiny wave in her track. Under the silken canopy of the little pavilion George was still sitting, with Nouna curled up asleep by his side; while the freshening breeze, which rustled in the heavily fringed curtains, blew straight in his face, bringing health and hope with its eager kiss, and sweeping away like noxious vapours the dark memories of the bygone winter. Ambition was stirring again within him, and a craving for hard work, that his faults and follies in the past might be atoned for by worthy achievement in the future. Lost in thought, he had for a moment forgotten the present, when a slight movement of her right arm, which lay across his own, brought his sleeping wife again to his recollection. Bending down with a softened expression in his eyes, he looked long at the tiny face, the sweeping black eye-lashes, and the full red lips, the mutinous curves of which gave him a warning he scarcely needed that, when once the depression of weak health was past, it might still need all his love for her and all her love for him to keep the little wilful creature within the due bounds of dignified matronhood. The “semblance of a soul,” as Rahas called it, had indeed peeped forth in her, and George Lauriston’s belief that “the influence of an honest man’s love was stronger than that of any mesmerist who ever hid pins,” had been amply justified; but Nouna was not, and never would be, the harmless domestic creature, absorbed in household duties, whom a husband can neglect or ignore with impunity. Such as she was, however, George was more than content that she should be, and the wavering young heart which had turned to him in the dark days he was determined by every loving and wise means to keep true to him in the brighter time.
And so, with good promise of a fair future, the sun went down in a golden haze on the calm sea, as the yacht still sped on for the warm lands of orange and palm.
THE END.