She withdrew her hands; her lids wavered before his steady gaze. Something ineffably sweet crept into the dark eyes; a quick, almost imperceptible quiver flashed over her chin, and her lips parted in tremulous protest against the possibility of jest.
"I'm—I 'm glad that you do remember me," she said, with a vague little smile.
"I loved you—oh, how I loved you on that long-ago voyage," he said recklessly. "I used to lie awake half the night in my berth, lamenting the fact that I was so ungainly and so homely, and so utterly unfit to be a story-book hero to you. I had a terrible fear that my legs would always be beanpoles and that my chest would never grow to even respectable proportions. I thought my ears were big and—"
"They were big," she interposed, the mysterious quaver still in her voice.
"They were like bat's ears, only bigger," he agreed dismally. "And I hated my freckles and despaired of my hair, which would curl up at the back of my neck. All this time you were so lovely, so perfect, so adorable—"
"What a rhapsodist you are!" she cried.
"You didn't possess a single flaw—not one," he announced firmly. "Every boy on the boat was perishing of love for you. By Jove, you knew it, too."
"Oh, you forget how young I was!"
"At any rate, you knew I was sick over you. And for months after we landed in New York—yes, until long after I went away to boarding-school—you were the princess of my dreams, the treasure of my heart. Then I thought I had forgotten you. You slipped back into my memory and hid yourself completely away. There you stayed snugly, serenely, quite as if I had stored you in a safety deposit box, all the while growing more beautiful, more lovely, more valuable. Last week I opened the box and took you out. I was amazed to find that you had always been there. I had put you there as a little girl, and when I came to take you out, you were a beautiful lady. I'd been treasuring you up through all these years without really knowing it. I never knew I was so rich."
A sudden panic assailed her. She realized, without warning, that she was being made love to, and that underneath his fanciful declarations there was something real, and strong, and earnest. She might have laughed at him and chided him for his gallantry had it not been for one distressing obstacle: he, Bosworth Van Pycke, had been lying just as snugly all these years in the deepest recesses of her heart. Unlike him, however, she had never quite forgotten the flaxen-haired lad of the steamship.