She was still a child to him. It was odd that he still could not dissociate her in his mind from the little girl with the pigtail and wistful eyes who had waited on him hand and foot all his life. 62 Perhaps if he could have realized that Marie was a woman, at least in heart and thoughts, there might have been a better understanding between them; but as it was—well, everything was all right, and Marie had written to Aunt Madge that she was "ever so happy."
It was just as they reached the hotel again that Mrs. Heriot said with a sentimental sigh: "Perfect, perfect weather, isn't it? Glorious days, and—oh, did you notice the moon last night?"
Chris stood quite still. With a shock of guilt he remembered Marie's little request to him and his own forgetfulness. The angry blood rushed to his face. He hated to feel that perhaps he had disappointed her.
He left Mrs. Heriot in the lounge and went straight up to his wife's room. She was not there, but a book which he knew she had been reading was lying open on her dressing-table and a little pair of white shoes stood neatly together on the rug.
Chris rubbed the back of his head with a curiously boyish look of embarrassment. It seemed odd to think that he and little Marie Celeste were really husband and wife! He cast a furtive look at himself in her mirror. He did not look much like a married man, he thought, and laughed as he took up the book which Marie had been reading. It was a book of poems, and Chris made a little grimace. He had never read a poem in his life, but his eyes fell now on some of the lines which had been faintly underscored with a pencil:
"What shall I be at fifty,
Should nature keep me alive—
If I find the world so bitter
When I am but twenty-five?"
He read the words through twice with a vague sense of discomfort.