XII
Thorpe slept little that night. He wandered about the sand hills until nearly dawn. It seemed to him that he had exhausted the category of possible ills; he could think of nothing else. After all, it did not matter. The woman alone mattered. He knew that when he had persuaded her to marry him (he never used the word “if”), he could control her imagination and make her happy; and no other man alive could do it. In twenty different ways he could make her forget everything but the fact that she was his wife.
The next day Nina did not appear until the party was gathered about the table for luncheon. She explained that she had slept late in order to be in good trim for the party that night, and had spent the rest of the morning making an alteration in her evening frock.
She nodded gaily to Thorpe, and took a seat some distance from him. She looked very pretty. Her spirits, like her colour, were high, her eyes brilliant. Nevertheless, there was a change in her, indefinable at first; then Thorpe decided that she had acquired a shade of defiance, of hardness.
But he had no time for thought. Mrs. Earle’s flashing eyes were challenging him on one side, Miss Hathaway’s fathomless orbs on the other. Opposite, Miss Shropshire, for the first time, displayed an almost feverish desire to engage his attention, and made herself uncommonly agreeable.
The afternoon was spent in packing and resting for the dance. The only woman to be seen without the tents was Miss Shropshire, who took Thorpe for a long walk and entertained him with many anecdotes of Nina’s eccentricities.
“She is very mutable,” said Thorpe, at length; “but I should not have called her eccentric.”
“Should not you?” demanded Miss Shropshire. “Now, I should. But then you have seen so much of the world, so many varieties of women. Nina seems very original to us out here. I often wonder, well as I know her, what she will say and do next. Oh, Mr. Thorpe, does not that ship look beautiful?”
But Thorpe, who found a certain satisfaction in talking of the beloved object, gently led her back to her former theme, and learned much of Nina’s childhood and school-girl pranks. There was no hint of the mystery, nor did he wish that there should be.
Shortly after supper they started on horseback for the Mission, the evening gear following in a wagon. Horses and conveyance had been sent by Don Tiburcio.