The sun was setting over Valetta as the great P. and O. swung and throbbed back to her course. Malta lay rose and gold in the sunset, the Church of St John looked gold inlaid with pink and amber, the old auberges where the Knights once kept their palaced state sparkled red and gold in the heat of the sun’s dying radiance, and the exquisite high-walled little gardens looked chips of garnet, emerald and topaz, and even the carob-trees and prickly pears in the sparcer bare and rocky valleys were jeweled and gay in the waning splendor. Back of and over the city of Valetta, with its queer, steep, twisted streets and its picturesque and magnificent buildings—more flowers, more great and varied architecture, and more human beings and homes are packed into Malta’s teeming ninety-five square miles than are in the same space anywhere else—hung the sunset’s gorgeous curtain of ever-changing amethyst and gold, crimson and rose and apple-green and fire-shot lemon, and here in front of the island at her feet the great blue ocean rippled and spread like a tremulous carpet woven of blue and green gems.
And this was the background against which, when they came on to the deck, after hastily changing for dinner, Bruce and Crossland first saw their regiment’s latest recruit—Captain Crespin’s girl-wife.
The Crespins too already were dressed to dine, and she, in her soft frock of delicate blue, with touches here and there of vivid green velvet, which the Vicar had proudly pronounced “most happy,” an inch of silvery gray fur at its fluted hem, a great bunch of saffron and lemon roses, that Crespin had bought her in Valetta’s fragrant flower market, in her hands, and a rose—one of the deep ones—at her breast, and loosely over her hair the shawl of black Maltese lace that Antony too had bought as they wandered about the old, once Phœnician town of the Hospitalers, looked for all her palpably English tea-rose face not unlike some exquisite Maltese.
They were standing by the rail, watching the sunset city—the Crespins—but Antony was more particularly watching her, his face turned a little towards the deck, and he saw his brother officers, and hailed them.
When he introduced them to “my wife,” Bruce, forgetting it was for her to grant it, if she chose, not for him to ask it, impulsively held out his hand—after all she was one of them now—and Lucilla instantly and cordially gave him hers; and when he let it go, not too quickly, she held it out with a pretty friendly gesture, half girlish, half matronly to Dr. Crossland, and said to them both, “How jolly! I thought I should have to wait until we got to Sumnee before I knew any of you. This is ever so much nicer.” And her big blue eyes, deep and clear as sapphires, but softer under their curled fringe of long dark lashes, said shyly, “Please like me.”
“By Jove, Mrs. Crespin”—she was not very used yet to being called so, and she flushed deliciously, and a dimple trembled at one corner of her bow-shaped red mouth—“By Jove, it is ripping of you to say so,” Bruce stammered delightedly. And Crossland looked what Bruce had said.
They saw without looking the relief in each other’s faces.
Crespin saw it too, and laughed aloud.
“What is it?” Lucilla demanded.