“I dare say he was attracted by the similarity of names.”
Nina was fidgeting with the ends of ribbon hanging from her belt. “See here,” she said, suddenly dropping them, and speaking with the utmost simplicity, “you remember what you were telling me this morning?”
“Our conversation lingers most pleasantly with me.”
“About my husband, and knowing a lady called Nina who has so much money, and who lost a little girl, and that my husband knew her, too.”
“Pardon me, I don’t think I was quite so exact. I said he might possibly know her.”
“Well, I must have got confused. I didn’t rightly understand what you said; but anyway it made me feel bad and suspicious of my husband, because—well, never mind why—and I promised you I wouldn’t say anything about it lest it might hurt his feelings. But he is so clever he just found out, and I think perhaps I had better not talk any more about him or about myself; for he will tell me everything all in good time; but I will talk of anything else. Is it a bargain?” and she held out a little frank hand.
Just for one instant he was touched,—he, the hunter in search of prey. There was a relaxation in the mask of habitual reserve that he wore, a softening of the faint but hard lines about the drooping moustache. “It is a bargain, certainly,” he said, quietly, and he pressed the fingers confidingly entrusted to him, and stood respectfully silent as she nodded a gay “Good-bye” and rapped on the door beside her.
Upon being bidden to enter, she went in and seated herself on the extreme edge of the couch opposite the berth where lay the tall young lady from Boston.
The girl was the personification of health and good-humour, as she sat with lips parted, white teeth gleaming in a merry, childish smile, and eyes fixed steadily on her languid but quietly observing companion. However, she would not talk. She was not accustomed to the presence of French maids, and her aversion was so plainly marked that Miss Marsden humoured her, by saying, “Marie, go for a walk.”
Miss Marsden was decidedly better. She had ceased wishing to be thrown to the fishes, and had even begun to take a feeble interest in the affairs of persons about her. This girl seemed particularly entertaining to her, and Marie had brought her a very spicy bit of gossip, from Lady Forrest’s maid, with regard to the black-looking captain who was so domineering and unkind to this “preetty, preetty leetle wife,” who, in her turn, did not care “at all, at all,” about him.