"The port?" she repeated.
Richard swallowed his black coffee. Perhaps it might steady him and clear his head. The numbness of his faculties and senses alike exasperated him, filling him with a persuasion he would say precisely those things wisdom would counsel to leave unsaid.
"Yes—you know I generally go down and sleep on board the yacht."
There was a momentary pause. Madame de Vallorbes' lips parted in a soundless exclamation. Then she pushed back the modest folds of the mantilla, leaving her neck free. The action of her hands was very graceful as she did this, and she looked fixedly at Richard Calmady.
"I did not know that," she said slowly. Then added, as though reasoning out her own thought:—"And Naples harbour is admittedly one of the most pestilential holes on the face of the earth. Are you not tempting providence in the matter of disease, Richard? Are you not rather wantonly indiscreet?"
"On the contrary," he answered, and something of mockery touched his expression, "I see it quite otherwise. I have been congratulating myself on the praiseworthy abundance of my discretion."
And the words were no sooner out of his mouth than Richard cursed himself for a bungler, and a slightly vulgar one at that. But upon his hearer those same words worked a remarkable change. Her gloom, her abstraction, departed, leaving only a pretty pensiveness. She smiled with chastened sweetness upon Richard Calmady—a smile nicely attuned to the semi-religious simplicity of her dress.
"Ah! perhaps we are both a trifle out of sorts this morning!" she said. "I, too, have had my little turn of sickness—sickness of heart. And that seems unfair, since I rose in the best disposition of spirit. Quite early I went to confession."
"Confession?" Richard repeated. "I did not know your submission to the Church carried you to such practical lengths."
"Evidently we are each fated to make small discoveries regarding the habits of the other, to-day," she rejoined. "Possibly confession is to me just what those nights spent on board the yacht, lying in that malodorous harbour, are to you!"