Katrine laid her hand on the back of a couch and spoke two trembling words:
“Captain Blair!”
At the sound of her voice he turned, wheeling towards her with a swift light movement, so that she might see his face, might look in his eyes—grey, magnetic eyes, curiously light against the sunburn of his face...
Five minutes later, seated upon the huge bamboo couch, supported by strong arms which seemed to bound the world, Katrine slowly recovered collected thought.
“You—are—Jim! ... Jim is—You! ... Then what of Captain Bedford? Where is he? Is there a Captain Bedford? Is he a real living man, or just a fictitious person invented for—”
“Indeed no! He is real enough, poor fellow, but in Egypt still, laid by the heel; unable to move. I only—only took his place!”
“I think,” announced Katrine slowly, “I am very angry!”
It seemed an incongruous statement to make, considering the position and appearance of the speaker, but the hearer received it with a gravity which showed that his own conscience was not altogether at ease.
“Dearest, before you judge, let me speak! Hear what I have to say! I had no intention of deceiving you. Such an idea never entered my head until at the last moment a cable arrived to say that Bedford was incapacitated, and could not sail. We were worried, all of us, to think that you should miss his help. I was racking my brains to think what I could do, when the inspiration came to meet you myself. It was an easy matter to get off for a few weeks, as there was leave owing to me, and I had started almost before I had time to think. Then came misgivings! I did not know how you would take it, if it would seem to you like going back on my promise. I had promised to keep on neutral ground for three months, and a tête-à-tête on shipboard seemed hardly playing the game.—I started on the heat of an impulse, afire to see you at the first possible moment; I landed at Port Said in a blue funk, the joy at the thought of meeting swallowed in dread of what you might say. I would have given a pile at that moment to have been safely back in India. Then—you know how! we met on shore. I knew you at the first glance, and, Katrine! you knew me. No matter who I was, or by what name I called myself, you belonged to me, and you knew it!
“At that moment, for the first time, it flashed into my head to take Bedford’s place in Bedford’s name. I had seen the list of passengers, and I knew no one on board. Ours is an out-of-the-way station, and I have seldom been home these last years. It seemed to me that if I kept close and avoided the smoke-room, I might very well get through the rest of the voyage without an explanation as to name. And I remembered what you had said—all the little feminine arguments you had used rose up and argued with me as they had never done before. You said that to meet a man with whom you were expected, almost pledged, to fall in love, was a big handicap to success; that if we could have a chance of meeting in the ordinary way, as strangers pledged to no special interest, we could test the strength of the mutual attraction far more surely. And another time you said (I think this influenced me more than anything else!) you said that one glance at my face, five minutes in my society, would tell you more than a hundred letters! Do you remember saying that? The inference was that the shape of my nose or ears was to count more than character.”