“Are you still determined to go?” he asked.
“Certainly.”
“It’s time to go, then. The ship sails at noon. There’s a cab down-stairs for you.”
Her valise was already packed and strapped; so was her small steamer trunk, and she had nothing to do but put on her hat. She had been expecting him, and in half an hour they were on board the great liner, and had been shown their staterooms. Bennett was waiting for them at the wharf, and the big ship swung majestically from her moorings and moved down the bay, past the rugged sierra skyline of brick and granite that had stimulated Elliott’s fancy when he last sailed from this port on the apparently endless trail of gold.
During the first half of the voyage he did not find Margaret conversational; she appeared to endure his presence with bare patience. She had plenty of other society on board, but neither did she seem to care much for the men who tried to scrape acquaintance with her with the relaxed etiquette of travel. She appeared to take a fancy for Bennett, however, and spent hours in long talks with him when she was not reading or gazing meditatively from her deck-chair across the dark, unstable sea.
Elliott perceived that he had done wrong, but he did not see how to remedy it. He had indeed been tactless and brutal; he had, or it looked as if he had, tried to force himself upon her while she was virtually his guest. Still, he thought that she might have misunderstood him less violently; and, while he admitted that he had been served rightfully, he felt aggrieved that he had not been served more mercifully. However, since she appeared to have no taste for his conversation, he was prepared, for the present, to dispose of it elsewhere.
But she called him to her that afternoon on deck, and pointed to an unoccupied chair beside her own. He sat down and looked at her with an expression that he tried to make severe, but which failed in the face of her smile.
“Don’t you think it’s very absurd for fellow passengers not to be friends?” she asked.
“Very,” he replied, a little stiffly.
“Come, you see I’m making the advances. You were rude and unkind to me, and you haven’t apologized as you should. Are you sorry?”