“Oh, but you do not understand!” she cried. “You are so very much perplexed. It is enough for me that you are perplexed. I am content. I am the puzzle you will never solve. So! La la! You will never cease to wonder. Look!”
She pointed her finger at a man who was crossing the Green below them.
“I am a puzzle to zat man also. He thought that he understood.”
“Landover? What do you mean?”
A spasm of fury transformed her features. She hissed out the words:
“I did spit in his face last night,—zat is all.”
The thirteenth of April, 1918, came on Saturday. Defying superstition, Ruth selected it as her wedding day. It was a bright, warm autumn day, bestowed by a gallant sun, and there was great rejoicing over this evidence of God's approval. It came as a winter's whim, for that night the skies were black and thunderous; the winds roared savagely between the lofty walls of Split Mountain and whined across the decks of the slanting Doraine, snug in the little basin, while out on the boundless deep the turmoil of hell was raging.
And so began the honeymoon of the stowaway and the lady fair, even as the “voyage” of the jockey and his bride had begun a fortnight before. They sat at the Captain's table in the ghostly, dismantled saloon. Above them hung two brightly burnished lanterns, shedding a mellow light upon the festal board. Outside, the whistling wind, the swish of the darkened waters, the rattle of davits and the creak of the straining timbers.
Up from his place at the head of the table rose the gray and gallant skipper.
“Up, gentlemen,” said he, his face aglow. “I give you the health, the happiness and the never diminishing glory of the governor's lady.”