She was all by herself, but she didn’t seem lonely; and she didn’t seem to want to talk. I’d watch her on deck, reading and working by the hour together, and sometimes just thinking, with a happy smile on her face.
She was a great one for reading, and she read clever books—histories and travels and biographies, and I would even see her studying grammars and suchlike. I wondered why she was so eager to improve herself, and I wondered what made her look so happy.
It was seeing me usually reading, too, that made her notice me, I think, and I contrived to make the books a means of falling into talk.
I offered to lend her one I had, that was the sequel to one of hers, and it came about after this, that she would let me sit with her on deck, and she said she learned things from me that none else had taught her. But she had plenty of brains, had Nan; anyone could see that, though, of course, I saw, too, that she had not been educated in the way girls are, and, in fact, that she wasn’t a lady, as the saying goes.
Nan was a lady, every inch of her, as far as Nature went; but she hadn’t the ways of those “born.” I could see that then, having my mother and my sisters and the dear old Rectory full in my mind. Perhaps I shouldn’t so easily tell the difference now.
Nan didn’t make any secret of her humble beginnings. She had been a girl in a baker’s shop, and she had been nurse in a Children’s Hospital.
I supposed that was where she picked up her gentle manners. But that hadn’t lasted long, she said, and she had never had any time for improving her mind. And she told me, that her only friends were in a low walk of life.
That didn’t matter to me. I fell in love with Nan, before we had been talking half an hour—before, indeed, we had ever spoken at all, and I asked her to marry me, just ten days before the ship landed at Australia.
She refused me. I hadn’t supposed she would accept me right off. In spite of her frank cordiality where she trusted, there was a sort of impenetrableness and stand-offishness about Nan, which always rebuffed me. I felt somehow that she wasn’t in love with me. But I thought that was her way. And I didn’t expect to find that she was on the eve of being married to somebody else. And yet I might have guessed it if I hadn’t been a fool.
That was the secret of her dreamy, happy smile—of her suppressed excitement as the voyage neared its close—of stray allusions which, preoccupied with my own hopes, I had totally misunderstood. I had got the impression that she was going to join her brother in Australia; now I found that it was her lover, who was awaiting her—her lover, whom she hadn’t seen for seven years.