Nasmyth appeared to ponder over this, though his heart was beating faster than usual, for the suggestion of confusion which he had noticed in the girl’s manner had its significance for him.
“Well,” he conceded, “it may have been Acton, but I almost ventured to believe she meant somebody else. In any case, I shouldn’t like to think you were displeased at my reappearance. If you are, I can, of course, go away again.”
“I am not the only person at Bonavista. Wouldn’t anybody else’s wishes count––Mr. Acton’s, for instance?”
“No,” asserted Nasmyth reflectively. “At least, not to anything like the same extent.”
Violet laughed. “The difficulty is that nobody can tell how much you really mean. You are so seldom serious.” She cast a quick glance at him. “You were not like that when you first came here.”
“Then,” said Nasmyth, “you can blame it on Bonavista. As I have been trying to explain to Mrs. Acton, who made a similar observation, there is glamour in this air. It gets hold of one. I was, no doubt, a tediously solemn person when I left the Bush, but you will remember that soon after I arrived here, you and I sailed out together into the realms of moonlight and mystery. I sometimes feel that I must have brought a little of the latter back with me.”
Violet said nothing for half a minute, during which she lay resting on one elbow, looking down upon the cool, green flashing of the water a hundred feet below, and again Nasmyth felt a little thrill run through him. She was so very dainty in speech and thought and person, a woman of the world he had once belonged to, and which it now seemed he might enter again. Her delicately chiselled, half-averted face matched the slight but finely moulded figure about which the thin white draperies clung. She turned and looked at him.
“You certainly can’t be serious now,” she declared.
“I assure you that when I mentioned the glamour and mystery, I was never half so serious in my life. They are, after all, very real things.”