"His sponsor so soon? Beware, little girl; they say he never loved since a certain queen of society threw him over for strawberry leaves."
"Threw him over!" A line of Tennyson regarding the value of coronets flashed across her. She wondered with a girlish contemplative scepticism how this bronzed physique, this heroic modelling, this almost womanly gentleness of expression had failed, having won, to hold.
Hour after hour passed in the usual shipboard routine, by which every day became the exact counterpart of its forerunner. Only to Elsie was each moment a joy and a revelation. It was impossible to disregard the fact that, from being a juvenile of no account, she had developed into a personage—a personage, whose humble servitor society had been ready enough to serve. In the conquest there was no elation such as might have existed for maturer women. She was too absorbed with the all ruling presence to heed what happened around. The wind was only fresh when it carried his voice to her ear, the waves only buoyant when they danced beneath their mutual pacings; day was light, because she shared it with him; night was dark, because they were apart.
At last Mrs Willis betrayed signs of alarm. "A mild flirtation is all very well, but people will talk; you must really be careful, Elsie! What will Victor Dorrien say when he comes to claim his bride?"
Dorrien! His bride! The words mentally thrust Bradshaw into the binding of Keats; she suffocated as though she had steamed direct from Eden to seaside lodgings. Was she indeed affianced to this almost unremembered lover of her childhood, and was she indeed journeying straight into his arms? How came it that the purpose of her voyage had been almost forgotten, that the seconds had grown so full of actuality as to outsize the horizon, the zenithed sunshine so blinding, that all surroundings seemed enveloped in atmospheric haze?
Each morning in her cabin she registered a vow that the coming day should be the last of illusion, that the stern facts of destiny should be faced; each night her fevered, impatient brain cried for dawn, to prove by the sight of the noble outlines, the sound of the beloved voice, that the end was not yet come. It was scarcely his utterances that attracted; perhaps the knowledge of his soul grew best from what he failed to say, what he failed to seem. But she saw the weary boredom of his eyes change to fire as her glance sought his, and she knew her lightest speech sped like spores upon the wind to find a root and resting place within his heart. She yearned to hint at her projected fate—she yearned, yet dreaded. Dissection of the sentimental mosaic of years is no facile undertaking, so many scraps and fragments go to the gradual making of the romantic whole, and she dared not approach the culminating tangle of the love story without explaining in detail the nascence and growth of the dilemma.
Thus with the course of the vessel drifted the craft of emotion, past Suez, through the broil of the Red Sea, out again into a sapphire ocean.
Mrs Willis, looking ahead, saw breakers and imminent wreck.
"You are both mad," she thundered at Elsie. "This must cease; you must tell him that in a few days, immediately on your arrival in Bombay in fact, you are to marry."