“Is that what made you look so solemn?” the Judge inquired playfully.
She blushed a little and shook her head reprovingly, “It is no joking matter. Try it yourself and see how you feel. Why, even Martin looked serious.”
“Frankly, I was scared to death,” Collingwood admitted. His wife laughed softly. The Judge shook hands again with the newly made husband in an access of geniality.
He declined an invitation to the hotel breakfast which was all they could offer in the line of wedding festivity, but he found time later to appear aboard their boat.
“Mind,” he said as he wished Mrs. Collingwood good-by, “you have not seen the last of me. I am going to appear in your island paradise sometime when you least expect me. When things get unendurable here, I shall flee to you and solitude.”
“How long do you think you would endure it?” she inquired.
How long will you?”
“Ah! I must. I’m pledged. I shall have no excuse for repining. I took the step with my eyes open.”
“Well, I fancy you do not regret leaving Manila.” In the wholeness of his suddenly acquired sympathy with her, the Judge quite forgot that he had been one of the many persons contributing to the experience which had failed to endear Manila to her.
“No; my experiences here have not been altogether happy, but perhaps I was partially to blame.” She hesitated and looked over at the shining roofs, at the patches of green shrubbery relieving them, and, in the background, at the mountains where Lawton died. The launch whistled for its passengers before Judge Barton could reply, but he wrung her hand with the intensity of a lifelong friendship. And such is the perversity of the human soul that his heart ached as the launch darted up the Pasig. She had waited upon him with infinite patience and gentleness through nearly a month of illness. He had seen her daily. She had been so situated that the faintest effort of real kindness or of chivalry on his part could have won her everlasting gratitude, and probably, if he had desired it, her affection. He certainly fulfilled the ideal which her social traditions demanded of her husband more nearly than Collingwood did, and the Judge knew how to make himself liked when he wanted to. But he had not tried to be kind to Miss Ponsonby. He had been patronizing, and at times almost impertinent and unmanly. He had not a shadow of right to the grudging sense of having something that should have been his snatched away from him. He had even a feeling of impatience with her, a thought that she had cheated him, that she had chosen to hide her real self from him, and to reveal it cruelly at the moment when Fate put an insurmountable barrier between them. He could not stifle the miserable regrets, the sense of baffled yearning, that took possession of him. He did his best to shake off the memory of the wedding and of her face as he had seen it at the altar, but he could not do so. Mrs. Collingwood became an obsession. Before the coastguard cutter had pulled its anchor, he was wondering how soon and by what means he could invent an excuse for visiting her at her home.