There was a lady sitting alone on the deck, a dark-green cloth dress belted neatly about a jimp figure, and cut short enough to show tight-laced boots: a close fur cap tied over her ears—an ugly little woman, but all alive and ready for action.
Something familiar in her carriage drew Neckart's eye to her a second time. She nodded and smiled: "You have quite forgotten me?"
"Miss Fleming! It is so many years since I saw you! Or ought I to say Miss Fleming?" looking about for her companion.
She laughed: "I am quite alone. On the ship, and everywhere else, for that matter. They are all gone, Mr. Neckart." She stopped abruptly and turned her head away. Cornelia never could speak of her mother without choking.
"I did not know," said Bruce gently. "It is long since I was at the homestead."
"Yes, there's nobody but me," she said presently with a nervous laugh. "I manage to support myself by art. It's poor support, and poorer art. But I have scraped together enough money to take me to Rome to make it better. With shawl-straps and a satchel American women can go anywhere, you know."
"You do not look like one of the modern Unas," glancing down. There was, on the contrary, a singular degree of femininity in this woman: he remembered now how it used to impress him as a boy. In the crowds that had filled his later years Cornelia's face had faded completely out of his mind. It began to come up now out of his boyhood, not unpleasantly, but rather with much of the glamour of those early days clinging to it. Yet he was annoyed that any old remembrance was to be kept awake during the voyage. He had meant to make it a lapse of absolute forgetfulness, and after that—what? "A season of dreadful looking-for of judgment," he found himself repeating as he talked civilly to Cornelia about the color of the water. He rose at last, being under such a nervous strain that he could not keep still.
"I shall go and beg the captain to give me a seat next yours at table," he said smiling. "I must take an oversight of you."
"Pray do not," she said anxiously, laying her hand on his sleeve. "I will not be a charge on anybody. Why, I am as independent as any—female doctor! Just let me come and go without notice, and if ever you feel like talking to me, don't think of me as a young lady, but only as somebody whom you used to know when you were a boy."
Neckart bowed and smiled. There was something very cordial and sweet in the little speech. Was it genuine nature that dictated it or only fine tact? In any case, he was glad to be relieved of the duty of paying petits soins to any woman. Of course he would not neglect the poor creature, who appeared to be very lonely, and, in spite of her grotesque little swagger, as ill able to stand alone as any woman he had ever seen. He glanced at the homely attractive face looking far out to sea when he turned in his walk. The second time he caught her looking at him with a sadness and hunger in her eyes that drove the blood to his heart like a blow. What was that which had happened between them when they were both children? A love-affair? Absurd! It was impossible that any sane woman could remember such folly. With every drop of blood tingling hot within him he turned down the deck and buried himself in the crowd in the cabin. Why had she never married? But what did that matter to him? He did not come near her at the table, nor join her during the rest of the day. But why had she never married? Could it have been the thought of him which had kept her aloof and solitary all her life?