"As the day is long," she answered him steadily.
"But the day's not been overlong, by chance, has it?"
"Not half long enough."
"All's well, then, still." He pressed her—"You aren't weary of me yet?"
Damaris reassuringly shook her head.
Nevertheless she was very sensible of change in the tenor of their intercourse, sensible of a just perceptible hardness in his bearing and aspect. For some cause, the nature of which she failed to divine though she registered the fact of its existence, he no longer had complete faith in her, was no longer wholly at one with her in sympathy and in belief. He needed wooing, handling. And had she the knowledge and the art successfully to handle this sun-browned, golden-bearded, rather magnificent young master mariner—out here in the open too, the shout of the great port in her ears, the dazzle of the water and the push of the warm wind upon her face?
"Ah, why waste precious time in putting questions to which you surely already know the answer?" with a touch of reproach she took him up. "Show me rather where you live—where you eat and sleep, where you walk up and down, walk quarter-deck, when you are far away there out at sea."
"Does all that really interest you?"
Damaris' lips quivered the least bit.
"Why have you turned perverse and doubting? Isn't it because they interest me, above and beyond anything, beautifully interest me, that I am here?—It would have been very easy to stay away, if I hadn't wanted—as I do want—to be able to fancy you from morning until night, to know where you sit, know just what you first see when in the grey of the morning you first wake."