“I know that,” she said. “But who is going to bring back the sunshine into your life?”
He leaned against the wooden gate and gripped the top bar tight. What did she mean? Was she a woman or, after all, only the old fancied child of sea-foam and cloud?
“When I can eat like a pig and sleep like a dog,” he said lightly, “and feel physically fit, I shall be all right.” He smiled, and took her black-gloved hand. “And when I see the roses in your cheeks and hear you laugh as you used to laugh—that fascinating little laugh like a peal of low silver bells—then I’ll be the Princess Stellamaris’s court jester again.”
She smiled wanly. “You were never court jester; you were Great High Favorite.” She sighed. “How far off those childish days are!”
“They’ll return as soon as you’re happy.”
“Life is too full of pain for me to find happiness in superficial things,” said Stella.
For all his wretchedness he could have laughed, with a man’s sweet pity, at the tone of conviction in her philosophic but childish utterance.
“You must look for it and find it in the deep things,” said he.
She made no reply, but stood thoughtfully by his side, and drew with her fingers little lines in the summer dust on the upper surface of the bar of the gate.
“There’s something silly I want to say to you, Walter,” she murmured at last, “and I don’t quite know how to say it. It’s about the sea. I think you can understand. You always used to. Our long talks—you remember? Since all this has happened, the sea seems to have no meaning for me.”