Diana smiled at him. He was too, too clever.
Then he wanted to know about the parcel. How had she got it? Because he had wanted it—he had told Pillar so. “I wanted to keep it,” he said, “and some day I was going to pay you out—when you were hungry—on our honeymoon.” She let this pass unchallenged. “Diana, did you understand what I said?”
“Why should you have wanted to pay me out? Did you mind being left on the island?” She ignored the honeymoon.
And he said, of course he had minded. If she had stayed with him, he would have loved it. As it was, he had had no one to love but Robinson; he could not imagine what he would have done without Robinson, he had been so sympathetic and—jolly.
Diana wasn’t particularly interested in Robinson. She wanted to know more about that loneliness from which Miles had suffered so acutely. On that he would not dwell, but rather on the happiness of being on a desert island alone with Diana—some day! Wouldn’t she love it? She thought so, but suggested that if Pillar came too it might be more comfortable. He admitted it, accusing her of being a sybarite.
“You would never enjoy roughing it. You are meant to walk on red carpets—oh—that fatal snare of the red carpet! You shall walk on it some day—but just for once let’s go to a desert island. Have you ever imagined what it would be?”
Then Diana turned her face from the window to look at Miles, and she asked him if they had not both been on a desert island—each on their own—the last few days—or was it years? And Miles, seeing in her eyes the smile she had kept throughout the journey for mountains and burns, jumped to a glorious conclusion.
“You mean that the whole world is a desert island if we are not together?”
And that was just what she did mean, although she had not been able to express it. She had hesitated to put it into words, and now that she found the courage she found no words and she discovered, like many another before her, that they are but dumb things after all: that there are other ways and better ways of saying things: that nothing is so expressive as a silence, nothing tells so much or tells it so tenderly—that is, if it be a happy silence. The unbroken silence of misunderstanding is another thing.
“Now tell me,” she said, “what you want to say—I will be very serious.”