The girl seemed to find some implied reproach in the speech, for she turned and looked at her friend closely. “Do you feel it is my fault, Alice?” she asked.
The older woman shook her head. “How could it be your fault?” she answered. “If you couldn’t love him enough to marry him, you couldn’t, that’s all. But that is no reason why he should have hidden himself from all of us. Even if he could not stand being near you, caring as he did, he need not have treated me so. We have done all we can do, and Robert has been more than fine about it. He and his agents have written to every consul and business house in Central America, and I don’t believe there is a city that he hasn’t visited. He has sent him money and letters to every bank and to every post-office—”
The girl raised her head quickly.
“—but he never calls for either,” Mrs. Collier continued, “for I know that if he had read my letters he would have come home.”
The girl lifted her head as though she were about to speak, and then turned and walked slowly away. After a few moments she returned, and stood, with her hands resting on the rail, looking down into the water. “I wrote him two letters,” she said. In the silence of the night her voice was unusually clear and distinct. “I—you make me wonder—if they ever reached him.”
Mrs. Collier, with her eyes fixed upon the girl, rose slowly from her chair and came towards her. She reached out her hand and touched Miss Cameron on the arm.
“Florence,” she said, in a whisper, “have you—”
The girl raised her head slowly, and lowered it again. “Yes,” she answered; “I told him to come back—to come back to me. Alice,” she cried, “I—I begged him to come back!” She tossed her hands apart and again walked rapidly away, leaving the older woman standing motionless.
A moment later, when Sir Charles and Mr. Collier stepped out upon the deck, they discovered the two women standing close together, two white, ghostly figures in the moonlight, and as they advanced towards them they saw Mrs. Collier take the girl for an instant in her arms.
Sir Charles was asking Miss Cameron how long she thought an immigrant should be made to work for his freehold allotment, when Mr. Collier and his wife rose at the same moment and departed on separate errands. They met most mysteriously in the shadow of the wheel-house.