Relieved for the moment, she returned to bed and another nap. That accomplished, she dressed slowly, made her way to the saloon, and breakfasted alone. She began to eat with the mighty appetite that had directed her at her previous meals since leaving New York, but this morning there occurred to her a possible explanation of her hunger that made her leave the table with half its dishes untouched. She climbed the promenade-deck and there saw Stainton and von Klausen walking arm-in-arm.
The two men were in sharp contrast. The young Austrian, lithe, easy, an experienced voyager, trod the deck as he would have trod any other floor; his cheeks glowed and his blue eyes sparkled with health and the zest of life. Not so his companion. Stainton, although he bulked large and sturdy beside von Klausen, still showed some of the effects of his sickness: his face was drawn and grey, his glance dull, and he lurched with every roll of the ship.
Muriel was conscious of a distinctly unpleasant sensation. She felt that it was a little ridiculous of Jim thus publicly to exhibit his unfitness for sea-travel. She resented this juxtaposition on its own merits. The next instant, moreover, she was annoyed by her husband because he had not let her have the pleasure of presenting to him this ship-companion that, after all, was hers by right of discovery. Nor was that all: she felt no small degree of bitterness against von Klausen at the assumption that it might have been he who sought this acquaintanceship. Finally, she was disquieted by she knew not what: by, in reality, the fact that her husband, though she would not admit it, looked pale and old beside a man that looked uncommonly ruddy and young. She recalled with a blush what she had said to the captain of her husband's age, what the Austrian had said to her upon the same subject; she recalled his conjecture that he had seen her with her "father." She wondered now if von Klausen would have the impudence to offer to Jim in her presence an apology for his stupid mistake.
Von Klausen, as the event showed, had no impudence at all. Both he and Stainton greeted her heartily, the latter with a trifle more solicitude for her health than she thought seemly; and the Austrian was soon installed in a chair beside Stainton's.
"But do I not trespass?" inquired von Klausen with his sweeping inclination.
"On us?" said Jim. "Certainly not. Mighty glad to have you, I'm sure. You see, you have been extremely good to my wife while I was laid up."
Von Klausen looked at the name on the chair-back:
"Yet this person to whom the chair belongs?"
"Oh," Muriel encouraged him, in moral reaction against her recent annoyance, "that person hasn't been on deck once since we sailed."
Whereupon they all sat down, and the two men fell to talking while the band played in the sunlight and the blue-coated stewards handed about their trays. They talked, the American and the Austrian, of the differences between the United States and Austria, as noted by them, of money markets and percentages, of international law and treaties and standing armies and a host of other things that Muriel did not understand and did not care to understand. And she did not like it.