“Out of aviation—for keeps.”
“Oh, Jack! Did you really? I—I never thought—” The joyous exclamation stammered down to a more diffident, almost apologetic statement with a rising color. “I never really thought you’d ever give up so much, just for me.”
Now there was a whole lot of plain human in Jack Rankin. He didn’t ordinarily lie without necessity; but here was a sudden, irresistible temptation positively thrust at him to steal at least a little credit out of a situation which held nothing but the bitterest disappointment for him. His hesitation was just for a fraction of a second, and then he prevaricated by inference.
Nor was he overskilful about it. He was just wise enough to hold his peace and to squeeze her outstretched hand with a world of meaning. Her surrender was instant and complete. With radiant eyes in which there was just a hint of tears, she led him to the comfortable hammock, plethoric with pillows, which swung in the veranda breeze.
“I know it’s an awfully big thing to have asked you, Jack,” she comforted him with the half regretful confidence of a big-hearted girl who has just forced a sacrifice from her lover. “But you understand now how I felt about it, don’t you, dear? I just couldn’t marry you as long as you stayed in that horrible business.
“I could never sleep without seeing that awful grand stand and that field where poor Bob— Oh, I can’t bear to think about it. And with Jim sticking to it yet; he’s so obstinate. One in the family is bad enough. I just couldn’t bear it, Jack.”
Rankin just patted the round curve of her shoulder and still said nothing. Bob was one of the many who had paid the toll to the greatest of all games; Jim was the other brother. Rankin understood how the girl felt, and the scrupulous conscience which besets every decent young man when he is in love smote him.
Almost he confessed. But when a beautiful, tearful girl jumps to a conclusion and makes a self-sacrificing hero out of one, how shall a man who is ordinarily human disillusion her? Jack Rankin stifled the still, small voice and postponed the telling to a vague, more propitious future. Sufficient to the day the evil thereof. He would have trouble enough explaining his absence from the navy-yard, should his commanding officer by any chance look for him before his return. In the mean while, there were matters of infinitely greater importance.
Given a beautiful girl, a hammock, and the impending prospect of an indefinite separation, three o’clock in the afternoon arrives all too soon. When Ensign Rankin came to the officers’ mess, hurrying to make up for lost time, and trying to carry off an air of innocence as if he had been looking for his chief for quite a while, a couple of juniors looked furtively at him.
His guilty conscience was quick to catch the glance, and he knew that his nemesis had overtaken him. But of the full virulence of its malice he had no inkling as yet.