“I won’t pretend that I fail to understand—even to sympathize with you,” came the answer. “You must see none the less that I had no alternative. Augusta’s husband must be—well, like Cæsar’s wife.”
“There is nothing more to be said, I think,” admitted Spurrier, and the senator held out his hand.
“In every other matter, I feel only as your friend. It will be better if to other eyes our relations remain cordial. Otherwise my efforts on your behalf would give the busy-bodies food for gossip. That’s what we are both seeking to avoid.”
Spurrier bowed and watched the well-groomed figure disappear.
The cloudless days and the brilliant nights of low-hung stars and phosphor waters were times of memorable opportunity and paradise for other lovers on that steamer. For Spurrier they were purgatorial and when he realized Augusta Beverly’s clearly indicated wish that he should leave her free from the embarrassment of any tete-a-tete, he knew definitely that her silence was as final as words could have made it. The familiar panama hat seen at intervals and the curve of the cheek that he had once been privileged to kiss seemed now to belong to an orbit of life remote from his own with an utterness of distance no less actual because intangible.
The young soldier’s nature, which had been prodigally generous, began to harden into a new and unlovely bitterness. Once he passed her as she leaned 39 on the rail with a young lieutenant who was going to the States on his first leave from Island duty, and when the girl met his eyes and nodded, the cub of an officer looked up—and cut him dead with needless ostentation.
For the old general, who had pretended not to see him, Jack Spurrier had felt only the sympathy due to a man bound and embarrassed by a severe code of etiquette, but with this cocksure young martinet, his hands itched for chastisement.
Throughout the trying voyage Spurrier felt that Snowdon, the engineer, was holding him under an interested sort of observation, and this surveillance he mildly resented, though the entire politeness of the other left him helpless to make his feeling outspoken. But when they had stood off from Honolulu and brought near to completion the last leg of the Pacific voyage, Snowdon invited him into his own stateroom and with candid directness spoke his mind.
“Spurrier,” he began, “I’d like to have a straight talk with you if you will accept my assurance of the most friendly motive.”
Spurrier was not immediately receptive. He sat eying the other for a little while with a slight frown between his eyes, but in the end he nodded.