His strong hands pulled her round, so that her eyes met his.
“Katrine! do you like my ears? Are you satisfied with them now that you see them in flesh?”
“I take no interest in your ears. What are your ears to me? I was thinking of Jim Blair’s ears, and you are,—I don’t know what you are—a compound person, more strange than a hundred strangers... Oh, Jim! how could you? If you realised so much, why couldn’t you realise more? If I was already yours, then why trouble to play a part? Yes, I am angry; I am! I think you were wrong.”
“Sweetheart, I know it! Nobody knows it better than I. I am not excusing myself, only explaining how it came about. One false step, and then it seemed impossible to go back. I could not face the thought of owning up on board, we were so happy, so innocently happy, that it seemed criminal to break it all up. Confess now that I behaved well, that I made an exemplary escort?”
“You—you—made me dreadfully in love with you,” protested Katrine, stiffening her back, and holding him off with determined hands, when his delight at the confession took an active form. “And unhappy! Did you think it was a light thing to me to feel my loyalty slipping from me day by day—to be obliged to love one man, when another man was waiting? Did you think I had no heart for Jim Blair?”
“I knew you had, and I loved you for it. Do you remember how you put me on my guard? But I was Jim Blair, you darling, so all was well. I was afraid you’d worry, but at the worst it was a matter of days, and those days were going to save us months of waiting. That’s the way I put it, trying to convince myself that all would work out for the best. We should have remained on terms of the strictest friendship, if—if it hadn’t been for—”
Katrine shuddered. It would be long before she could talk calmly of the awesome experience through which she had passed. Her arms relaxed, she sank back, and they clung together in silence for long healing minutes.
“You never told me,” she whispered, “even at the end—what we thought was the end! You let me leave you, not knowing... Why did you not tell me then, and let me die in peace?”
His eyes met hers, gravely, questioning.
“Would it have made for peace? Would death have seemed more easy, or less? Was your brain clear enough to grasp explanations, or to have felt any comfort, if you had? And, beloved,—in the face of death what was a name? I loved you, you loved me, what did it matter by what name I was called? If it had been the end,—well! it would not have been as Miss Beverley and Captain—anything, that we should have met on another plane.—If we were saved, it was only a matter of two or three days...”