“I feel I’m the happiest woman in the world. I’m so happy I could almost cry, but I’m too happy even for that. You had me horribly frightened for a time. I thought I was to lose you.”
Lee Barton’s heart pounded up. Never a mention of losing herself. This, then, was love, and all real love, proved true—the great love that forgot self in the loved one.
“And I’m the proudest man in the world,” he told her; “because my wife is the bravest woman in the world.”
“Brave!” she repudiated. “I love you. I never knew how much, how really much, I loved you as when I was losing you. And now let’s work for shore. I want you all alone with me, your arms around me, while I tell you all you are to me and shall always be to me.”
In another half-hour, swimming strong and steadily, they landed on the beach and walked up the hard wet sand among the sand-loafers and sun-baskers.
“What were the two of you doing out there?” queried one of the Outrigger captains. “Cutting up?”
“Cutting up,” Ida Barton answered with a smile.
“We’re the village cut-ups, you know,” was Lee Barton’s assurance.
That evening, the evening’s engagement cancelled, found the two, in a big chair, in each other’s arms.
“Sonny sails to-morrow noon,” she announced casually and irrelevant to anything in the conversation. “He’s going out to the Malay Coast to inspect what’s been done with that lumber and rubber company of his.”