“Darling, don’t look out of the window. I know your little nose by heart—I love your profile—but tell me, do you remember anything else, I mean what you thought of me—it sounds so conceited to imagine for one moment that you thought anything—but if you did—?”
“Let me think—don’t disturb me!” She shut her eyes, and said, “I will try to remember.”
He waited. Was she really going to sleep? If he had been Uncle Marcus he would have been taken in; being more modern, he was not, but he had never seen her asleep and she looked so lovely that he let her sleep on, which was not in the least what she had expected; moreover, it was very dull, so she opened her eyes and asked if she had been asleep? And when he said, “No,” she vowed to herself this was no man to marry lightly—too unerring an intuition was his.
“Will you always know what I am thinking and feeling?” she asked.
He doubted it. He never knew of what she was thinking or what she was feeling. “Tell me something of what you feel.” And she told him how hungry she had felt when she had travelled south, from Loch Bossie, and what a comfort the parcel had been, how glad she had been to see the cocoanut shells.
“Why?” he asked.
Because, she said, she thought—as he had condescended to a joke—a bad one, of course, but a joke—it showed he could not be so angry with her after all.
“And that comforted you?” Another admission, this!
“Yes, it comforted me.”
“Then you must have minded my being angry with you?”