“I thought you were a Frenchman when I first saw you,” she confided to him over her shoulder. “But no Frenchman at Dieppe ever yet shouted ‘Excellent!’ with his face turned toward the New Haven steamers.”
The mirth in her tone was so welcome to him that he laughed in turn, without any clear idea of her words. He gathered her handbag up along with his own, and when she demurred he offered her gay defiance.
“It is the terrible boldness of a timid person,” he prattled, as he helped her down the steps, “but you must perceive that in the face of it you are quite helpless. Since I was born, I have never really had my own way before. But now I begin to believe in my star. After all, one is not an Englishman for nothing.”
“Oh, it is comparatively easy to be an Englishman in Dieppe,” she made answer.
CHAPTER II
The sky was dappled azure overhead, the water calm and fresh-hued below. When the ship’s company had disposed itself, and the vessel was making way outside, there were numerous long gaps of unpeopled space on the windy side, and to one of these the young couple tacitly bent their steps. They leaned against the rail, standing close together, with their faces lifted to the strong sweet breeze.
Viewed thus side by side, it could be seen that of the two the young man was just perceptibly the taller, but his extreme fragility excused his companion’s conception of him as a small man. On his head he had pulled tight for the voyage a little turban of a cap, which accentuated the foreign note of his features and expression. He was dark of skin and hair, with deep-brown eyes both larger and softer than is common with his sex, even in the South. The face, high and regular in shape, had in repose the careworn effect of maturer years than the boyish figure indicated. In the animation of discussion this face took on, for the most part, the rather somber brilliancy of a strenuous earnestness. Now, as it confronted the stiff Channel wind, it was illumined by the unaccustomed light of a frivolous mood. The ends of his slight mustache were lifted in a continuous smile.
“It is my gayest day for many, many years,” he told her, after a little pause in the talk. They had become great friends in this last half-hour. In the reaction from the questionable restraint of the coupé to the broad, sunlit freedom of the steamer’s deck, the girl had revealed in generous measure a side of her temperament for which he had been unprepared. She had a humorous talent, and, once she had gained a clew to his perceptive capacities in this direction, it had pleased her to make him laugh by droll accounts of her experiences and observations in Paris. She had been there for a fortnight’s holiday, quite by herself, she told him, and there was something in her tone which rendered it impossible for him to ask himself if this was at all unusual among English young ladies. His knowledge of Paris was also that of a stranger, and he followed her whimsical narrative of blunders and odd mistakes with a zest heightened by a recollection of his own.