"I think you could be," she answered, seriously.
He sat down in the chair young Atkins had left. "Tell me, and see," he suggested, half in fun.
Marie looked across at her husband, and then back at the man beside her.
"I was wondering," she said, "what would have happened if you had not pulled me out of the sea?"
"What would have happened?" He echoed her words with mock seriousness. "Well, you would have been drowned, of course."
"I know I—I don't mean that I—I mean, what would have happened to—to Chris—and everyone else."
Feathers did not answer. He vaguely felt that there was some serious question at the back of her words, but his experience of women was so small that he was unable to understand.
"We don't want to think of such things," he said briskly after a moment, "You are alive and well. Isn't that all that matters?"
She did not answer, and looking at her curiously, he was struck by the sadness of her face, by the downward curves of her pretty mouth and the wistfulness of her eyes, and suddenly he realized that he had inadvertently stumbled across a secret which he had never suspected, and it was—that this girl was unhappy!
Whose fault? The question clamored at his brain. Chris' fault or her own? He was conscious of anger against his friend.