“‘Time seemed to pause a little pace, I heard a dream go by.’”
“But out here in mid-ocean a little boat with lateen sails wouldn’t have much show. And dreams passing over—the idea is pretty, and is creditable to your imagination. But I thought your fancy was more militant. Now, for example, you like battle pictures—” he said, and paused inquiringly.
She looked at him quickly.
“How do you know I do?”
“You like Detaille particularly.”
“Am I to defend my taste?—what’s the answer, if you don’t mind?”
“Detaille is much to my liking, also; but I prefer Flameng, as a strictly personal matter. That was a wonderful collection of military and battle pictures shown in Paris last winter.”
She half withdrew her hand from his arm, and turned away. The sea winds did not wholly account for the sudden color in her cheeks. She had seen Armitage in Paris—in cafés, at the opera, but not at the great exhibition of world-famous battle pictures; yet undoubtedly he had seen her; and she remembered with instant consciousness the hours of absorption she had spent before those canvases.
“It was a public exhibition, I believe; there was no great harm in seeing it.”
“No; there certainly was not!” He laughed, then was serious at once. Shirley’s tense, arrested figure, her bright, eager eyes, her parted lips, as he saw her before the battle pictures in the gallery at Paris, came up before him and gave him pause. He could not play upon that stolen glance or tease her curiosity in respect to it. If this were a ship flirtation, it might be well enough; but the very sweetness and open-heartedness of her youth shielded her. It seemed to him in that moment a contemptible and unpardonable thing that he had followed her about—and caught her, there at Paris, in an exalted mood, to which she had been wrought by the moving incidents of war.