It was her first kiss and it clung, and a warmth that was warmer than her southern blood stole from it through her veins and to her heart. It was as though he had kissed her heart.
A burly prison warden in white with a huge revolver at his hip came in for tobacco, and she found herself thinking, “Good heavens, that thing is a man!” She was contrasting him with Carstairs. She had talked of men, talked of marriage, talked of love with Marianne or her girl friends just as she had talked of the price of salt fish or Norfolk Island strawberries or the latest fashion from Paris as exhibited by the garrison officers’ wives; but she had talked without knowing, almost without thinking. Her butterfly mind had flitted above these vast subjects as a butterfly flits sentient yet unthinking above a field of corn. It had suddenly come to rest—that which a moment before had been all wings suddenly becoming all eyes; come to rest swaying on the wind that moved the corn-stalk, astonished by the vision that had come so close, seeing everything but the poppies that nature so carefully hides amid the corn.
As she sat, her hands folded and her eyes fixed on the shop door as though she were wondering what else might come through it, the silence of the shop was broken by a faint clicking sound, the clicking of the old woman’s needles as she worked, forever busy like a spider in the dark; and now through the mind of the girl, as she sat with her eyes on the door, came half harlequin, half demon, stealing and hirpling, limping and laughing and turning somersaults, the strangest thought.
He didn’t kiss you, he kissed Marianne. He had mistaken her for Marianne; the warmth about her heart belonged to Marianne; the new outlook which had come to her was Marianne’s.
In a moment he had managed to put the spell on her, made of himself so to speak a window through which she saw a new world; and the window was Marianne’s, and the new world—by rights, if there are any rights in a matter of that sort.
She laughed as she thought over this matter. The thing was not yet serious with her; the handsome man whom she had admired while he talked to her sister, the man who had kissed her in mistake for her sister, was still a figure at a distance; he had not made himself yet a part of her life. That was to come.
It came with the rapidity which marks the processes of life and death in the warm lands, those terrible pays chauds where a woman is old at twenty-five, a passion full blown in an hour, a corpse corrupt in a day.
Every day Carstairs made his call at the shop. Being in love, he smoked many cigarettes; he called at the same hour and Marianne was there to receive him.
But there were two watchers now. After the fashion of his kind he did not push matters, knowing by instinct exactly the sort of girl he had to deal with. No one could have been more respectful than Carstairs, and at the end of a week when he told Marianne of his love for her he proposed marriage. Though a mate of a ship he had money of his own, not much but enough for him to engage in some business in the island; they would get married when he had made all his arrangements.