"That is a girl's way of looking at it," Morgan laughed easily. "With a man it is quite different. You see, dear, he fears so that the girl might change her mind, that he is not really happy and satisfied until she actually belongs to him."
"There you go, Morgan." Natalia looked away, answering his smile half-heartedly. "Joking when I am serious. But it is very fortunate, I suppose. I should always see the serious side of life if it were not for you. I am so glad that we are different, dear. You see—we are antidotes. You correct my seriousness—I sober your lightheartedness."
Morgan looked at her curiously.
"Yet you can be as gay as I, Natalia. You were so at school; you were on our long voyage together. It is only since we have been engaged that you have changed. What is it? Are you not entirely happy?"
"Of course I am—the happiest woman in the world! Only I feel my happiness differently from you. It is a more serious thing to me. It's my nature, I suppose. I've been trying all my life to let people know how happy I was, and even when in my most melancholy spells I found a certain quiet peace, I had to appear gay to keep others from thinking I was miserable. It's a trick of mine, to hide my real feelings, I suppose. We're all acting, anyhow, don't you think so?"
"No, I'm not," Talbot smiled down at her gayly. "I honestly believe I am as nearly frank as people get. I never could hide my emotions, and I've never yet learned to control my anger."
"How dreadfully you frighten me, Morgan." Natalia frowned in assumed fear. "Suppose you should get angry with me—would you treat me very badly? Would you whip me?" She laughed outright. "Dicey says there used to be an old farmer here who whipped his wife every Saturday night because he said it was the only way a man could make a woman respect him. And she also says that when the man was sent to jail for stealing his neighbour's cow, that his wife would go with him. Such a case makes one ponder, doesn't it, Morgan, as to which is the right way to hold another's love?"
"I'll never treat you that way, Natalia, because," and he hesitated, half-serious, "I'm almost afraid of you at times—when your eyes grow very black and the colour fades out of your face. I don't know whether it is anger, or what. It makes you wonderfully beautiful, though."
"I know—it is when I'm very intense. It's when my Spanish blood is aroused. Sometimes I have felt that I was acting without my own volition—that some one else, a new nature within me, was compelling me on to something I was helpless to combat. I will tell you about it some day, but not this morning. I've determined to let nothing mar our happiness to-day. But I have a request to make," she ended tentatively.
"Anything in the world—you have only to name it," Morgan replied promptly, swinging her hand in his, to and fro, like a happy schoolboy.