CHAPTER VII
Unspoken Love
Unspoken love! I think if I had yielded to the impulse of my heart, I would have poured out all those protestations of a lover’s ecstasy, incongruous here upon this starlit public deck, to a girl I hardly knew. I think, too, she might have received them with a tender acquiescence. The starlight was mirrored in her dark eyes. Misty eyes, with great reaches of unfathomable space in their depths. Yet I felt their tenderness.
Unfathomable strangeness of love! Who am I to write of it, with all the poets of all the ages striving to express the unexpressible? A bond, strangely fashioned by nature, between me and this little dark-haired Earth beauty. As though marked by the stars we were destined to be lovers....
Thus ran the romance of my unspoken thoughts. But I was sitting quietly in the deck chair, striving to regard her gentle beauty impersonally. And saying:
“But Miss Prince, why are you and your brother going to Ferrok-Shahn? His business––”
Even as I voiced it, I hated myself for such a question. So nimble is the human mind that mingled with my rhapsodies of love was my need for information of George Prince....
“Oh,” she said, “this is pleasure, not business, for George.” It seemed to me that a shadow crossed her expressive face. But it was gone in an instant, and she smiled. “We have always wanted to travel. We are alone in the world, you know––our parents died when we were children.”