A faint sound from Judge Barton’s couch told him that the Judge, too, was wakeful and had seen the sparkling drops; but he could not hear what that gentleman was saying to himself.
“Not a philosopher,” he murmured, “not a philosopher, but uncompromising. Why isn’t she attractive! She ought to be attractive.” Then, quite gently, “Poor creature! Why doesn’t she surrender? Why doesn’t she accept the situation and compromise with life?”
There was no one to answer. Presently Miss Ponsonby, as if realising that there might be wakeful eyes among the patients, got up and went out into the corridor. A few minutes afterwards, the bells, the whistles, and the revolvers of enthusiastic exiles flung out a Christmas greeting, and her relief came.
Each man took unto himself a partial responsibility for her tears. Judge Barton planned to wipe out the memory of his unchivalrous conduct by his most deferential manner and his very best conversation. Collingwood dreamed of abasing himself, and of settling without delay all doubts as to his attitude. If he saw a rosy vision of Miss Ponsonby reconciled to him and forgiving, he was not altogether conceited. He had been a man decidedly popular with women. But when the sixteen weary hours had passed away, and the afternoon shift of nurses brought not Miss Ponsonby but the red-haired lady of cheerful temperament, Judge Barton’s instinctive sigh was speedily followed by a rapt interest in Collingwood. That young man had allowed his disappointment to express itself by an involuntary twist in bed, so that he yelled in agony.
Chapter III
Some five or six weeks after the events narrated in the preceding chapters, Judge Barton’s Australian chestnuts were rattling their silver-plated harness on the Luneta driveway at sunset, while their owner was threading the mazes of a Sunday-night carriage jam. He had that day returned from a short vacation in Japan, where he had gone to recuperate after his attack of fever.
The hot season was coming on apace, and but little breeze disturbed the waters of the bay, which were sombred by the reflections of slate-colored clouds streaked across the zenith. The brilliancy of the sunset seemed to have driven apart the clouds in the west, however, where the sky was enamelled in hues of jade and amber and turquoise, seamed here and there with gold, and occasionally with a fading line of dark vapor. With the purple shapes of the mountains extending to right and left, with the foreshortened sweep of the waters, and with the motionless lines of the anchored vessels, the distant picture flamed out like a theatre curtain, while the motley assemblage which filled the oval around the bandstand was not unsuggestive of a waiting audience.
As he was in the act of leaning forward to note the outline of a great five-masted freighter, anchored abreast the bandstand, Judge Barton caught sight of a profile which was vaguely familiar to him, but which, for a moment, he quite failed to associate with a name. A second later, he remembered that he had always seen Miss Ponsonby in her nurse’s cap, and he could not determine whether it was the harmonious effect of imported millinery or some radical change in herself which lent a charm to her face never found there before.
As for the man at her side, it was something of a triumph to perceive the hat at just the angle at which the Judge’s imagination had pictured it, the angle affected by a very smart enlisted man.