Immediately afterward he fell into a sort of study, in a fashion not unusual with him. He freed Gabrielle’s hand, crossed his arms, and sat staring absently out across the ocean, with his lean body sprawled comfortably into the angles of the rocks, and his Panama tilted over his face.
“I wish to God I knew if I was going to get well and back to sea again!” he said, presently, in a fretful sort of voice.
Gabrielle, who had relievedly availed herself of this interval to shift by almost imperceptible degrees to a seat a trifle more distant, was now so placed that she could meet his eyes when he looked up. She had intended to say to him, as they had all been saying, some comforting vague thing about the doctor’s hopeful diagnosis of his illness, and about patience and rest. But when she saw the big, pathetically childish dark eyes staring up wistfully, a sudden little pang of pity made her say instead, gently:
“I don’t know, Tom. But you’re so young and strong; they all say you will!”
“I’m in no condition to ask a girl to marry me!” Tom said, moodily.
“Oh, Tom,” Gabrielle said, interested at once, “have you a girl?”
He looked at her, as she sat at an angle of the great shaded boulders, with a sort of sea-shine trembling like quicksilver over her. She was in thin, almost transparent white, with a wide white hat pushed down over her richly shining tawny hair and shadowing her flushed earnest face. The hot day had deepened the umber shadows about her beautiful eyes; tiny gold feathers of her hair lay like a baby’s curls against her warm forehead. Her crossed white ankles, her fine, locked white hands, the whole slender, fragrant, youthful body might have been made for a study of ideal girlhood and innocence, and sweetness and summer-time.
“Lemme tell you something,” the man began, in his abrupt way. And he took from his pocket a slim, flat leather wallet, brown once, but now worn black and oily, and containing only a few papers.
One of these was an unmounted camera print of a woman’s picture. She was a slim, dark woman, looking like a native of some tropic country, wearing a single white garment, barefooted, and with flowers about her shoulders and head. The setting was of palms and sea; indeed the woman’s feet were in the waves. She was smiling, but the face was clumsily featured, the mouth large and full, and the expression, though brightly happy, was stupid. The picture was dirty, curled by much handling.
“She’s—sweet,” Gay said, hesitatingly, at a loss.