“Ah,” answered Roden, “we have a written copy of it, written in Hebrew, in our small safe at the works, and only Von Holzen and I have the keys of the safe.”
Mrs. Vansittart laughed. “It sounds like a romance,” she said. She pulled up, and sat motionless in the saddle for a few moments. “Look at that line of sea,” she said, “on the horizon. What a wonderful blue.”
“It is always dark like that with an east wind,” replied Roden, practically. “We like to see it dark.”
Mrs. Vansittart turned and looked at him interrogatively, her mind only half-weaned from the thoughts which he never understood.
“Because we know that the smell of malgamite will be blown out to sea,” he explained; and she gave a little nod of comprehension.
“You think of everything,” she said, without enthusiasm.
“No; I only think of you,” he answered, with a little laugh, which indeed was his method of making love.
For fear of Mrs. Vansittart laughing at him, he laughed at love—a very common form of cowardice. She smiled and said nothing, thus tacitly allowing him, as she had allowed him before, to assume that she was not displeased. She knew that in love he was the incarnation of caution, and would only venture so far as she encouraged him to come. She had him, in a word, thoroughly in hand.
They rode on, talking of other things; and Roden, having sped his shaft, seemed relieved in mind, and had plenty to say—about himself. A man's interests are himself, and malgamite naturally formed a large part of Roden's conversation. Mrs. Vansittart encouraged him with a singular persistency to talk of this interesting product.
“It is wonderful,” she said—“quite wonderful.”