Charlotte smiled across the table at her husband. “Not unless I’m actually needed,” she replied.
“You hate it so badly, you’ll have to be excused,” Collingwood said. “Better let Kingsnorth take you for a stroll. You need exercise and his temper needs sweetening. He has been in a devilish mood all day.”
“You make me feel like a prescription,” said Charlotte, laughingly. “Mr. Kingsnorth, if your temper does not improve after a dose of my society, my husband’s faith in me as a panacea for all troubles of the mind will have gone forever.”
“I note that fact,” said Kingsnorth, gravely. “I commit myself now to come back grinning like a Cheshire cat.” But he knew, in spite of her light manner, that Charlotte was displeased. It was seldom that she permitted herself the least badinage with him; and he recognized it nearly always as a cloak to cover some hasty and more aggressive instinct.
Nevertheless, when they started away after dinner, she fell into a more intimate tone with him than she generally used. The sunset was just dying out, and its flaming radiance seemed to exaggerate the wide sweep of the waters, the white stretch of sand, and the lithe, swaying boles of the cocoanut groves. Charlotte paused to look about her in a sudden rush of tenderness for the solitude.
“It is wonderful how contented one can be in such a situation as this,” she said. “I am amazed at myself. I am never sad, seldom even lonely. I have a feeling, at times, that this could go on and on and on in endless æons, and I could ask no more than one day’s sunshine and that same day’s sunset. It is inexplicable and yet it is all in myself; anything to upset that harmony between my soul and this could make it a nightmare, an endless nightmare.”
“As it is to me,” Kingsnorth rejoined. “I don’t know why I stand it from day to day. I don’t see how mere dollars and cents can compensate for stagnating here. Yet I am such a slave to the dollar that I do stay; the good Lord only knows when I shall go away.”
“Yet you gave up your trip, you pretended to feel about this as you don’t feel. Why did you do it, Mr. Kingsnorth?”
“I wanted you and Martin to go. You can say what you please about being satisfied and contented; some of your radiance and vitality have disappeared in the last two or three weeks.”
Charlotte flushed uncomfortably. She did not enjoy the thought that she was so closely watched and studied. Kingsnorth, divining her thoughts, went on hastily.