He had seen very little of Mrs. Acton during the voyage. Sailing was not her feat, but the lady was winsome after her fast. Bellair had found her very brave, and there had not been such an opportunity to tell her so, as this night. He wanted enough light to see her face, and enough air to keep her above any qualm. They found a cane-table, on the lee-side, toward America, the light of a cabin passage upon it. Bellair ordered an innocuous drink for Davy and himself, and whispered along a pint of champagne, having heard it spoken well of as an antidote for those emerging from the sickness of the sea.
“... It’s a little charged, cidery sort of a drink—just made for people convalescent from the first days out of ’Frisco,” he said.
She drank with serene confidence, and leaned back to regard the glass and the two.
“It’s not unlike a wine I drank long ago,” she observed, and her eyes warmed with the memory.
“A wine?” he said.
“Just so, but it’s no crutch for the poor, I should say, by the way it comes——”
She pointed to the service-tub, which, unfortunately, was of silver.
“They like to keep it cold,” Bellair suggested.
“It would need ice to keep that cold,” she replied.
There was a lyrical lilt to her words that he had not known before; in fact he hadn’t quite known Mrs. Acton before. She was lifted from the stratum of the submerged. She had her hands, her health, and the days now and ahead were novel in aspect. A little seasickness was nothing to one who had met the City, and for years prevented it from taking her boy. The heart for adventure was not dead within her.... In fact, Bellair, surveying the little plump white creature in new black, with a sparkle in her eye, her hand upon the thin stem of a glass, entered upon a pleasant passage.