"Oh, you mustn't be troubled about that. It isn't your fault, you know, anyhow. Besides, people won't say anything because they won't know anything about it—if we stay away from that sanitarium."
In the effort to put him at his ease, her own distress seemed to vanish, and Kirk immediately felt more cheerful.
"It's getting along toward dinner-time," he said, "so let's see what we can find in the way of food. You can be sheltered in one of these houses, I suppose, though from the looks I'd almost prefer the night air."
They stumbled out into the unlighted street and began their search; but, seen close at hand, the cooking arrangements of Taboga proved most unattractive. Outside the sanitarium, it seemed, there was not a stove on the island. Charcoal braziers set upon the floors or in the dirt yards served all culinary purposes, and the process of preparing meals was conducted with an indifference that promised no savory results. About the glowing points of light wrinkled hags appeared irregularly, as if brewing some witch's broth, but they could not understand the phenomenon of Americans being hungry and signified no readiness to relieve them. In several instances Kirk and Mrs. Cortlandt were treated with open suspicion. But eventually they found a more pretentious-looking place, where they were taken in, and, after an interminable wait, food was set before them—chicken, boiled with rice and cocoanut, black beans and cocoanut, fresh, warm milk, and a wondrous assortment of hothouse fruits. They would have enjoyed the meal had it not been for the curious faces that blocked every aperture in the room and the many bright eyes that peered at them from each shadow.
But in spite of their equivocal situation, Edith seemed fully to have regained her spirits. Even the prospect of spending the night in this place apparently did not dismay her.
"We have created quite a sensation," she said, laughingly. "I wonder if it makes the animals in the zoo as nervous to be stared at."
Kirk was half puzzled, half relieved by the lightness of her mood.
"If you have finished this health-food," he remarked, "we'll go back to the plaza and wait for the launch. I'm as full of cocoanut as a shell."
They descended to the square again, stared at all the way through open doors and followed by a subdued murmur of comment. Then they sat for a long time watching the stars, half minded not to regret the circumstance that had left them stranded together in such pleasant surroundings.
As if in despair over their impossible predicament, Edith gave way to a spirit of reckless vivacity, and Kirk, with a man's somewhat exaggerated sympathy for a woman's sensitive feelings, loyally strove to help her make the best of things in her own way. It was like a woman, he reflected, to follow her mood to the last extreme, and, being a man, he was not displeased. The change in her manner was too elusive for him to analyze. There was no real concession of her reserve—no sacrifice of the feminine privilege of prompt and complete withdrawal. If he had struck a false note, he knew that she would have turned frigid in an instant. But he could not help feeling that some barrier which had existed between them had been magically removed. Her apparent obliviousness to all that under the circumstances might have troubled her was a subtle compliment to himself, and soon he, too, forgot that there was anything in the world beyond their present relation to each other.