They were nearing the Saragossa in the dusk, and their call had been answered with a rousing cheer from the ship....
"Please, sir, you said you would take me sailing," Paula called, as she readied the head of the ladder.
Though he could not stand, Peter Stock had an arm for each; and they were only released to fall into the embrace of Father Fontanel. They saw it now in the ship's light: Pelée had stricken the old priest, but not with fire.... The two were together shortly afterward at supper, in clean dry make-shifts, very ludicrous.
"I came to you empty-handed, and soiled from the travail of the journey," she whispered. "All but myself was in a certain room that faced the North."
"There are booties, flounces and ribands in the shops of Fort de France," Charter replied with delight. "Peter Stock shall be allowed certain privileges, but not to make any such purchases. I carry circular notes—and insist on straightening them out."
"Haven't you discovered that Skylarks are not of the insisting kind—even when they need new plumage? Anything that looks like insistence nearly scares the life out of them. Isn't it a dear world?"
All this was smoothly coherent to him.... Alone that night, they drew deck-chairs close together forward; and snugly wrapped, would have nothing whatever to do with Peter Stock's sumptuous cabins. They needed floods of rest, but were too happy, save just to take little sips of sleep between talk.
"You must have been afraid at first," she said, "of turning a foolish person's head with all that beauty of praise in your letters.... I think you were writing to some image you wanted to believe lived somewhere, but had little hope ever really to find. I could not take it all home to me at first.... I felt that you were writing to a lovely, shadowy sister who was safely put away in a kind of twilight faëry—a little figure by a well of magical waters. Sometimes I could go to her, reach the well, but I could not drink at first—only listen to the music of the water, watch it bubble and flash in the moon."
"I love your mind, Paula Linster," he said suddenly, "—every phase of it. By the way—love's a word I never used before to-day—not even in my work, save as an abstraction."
She remembered that Selma Cross had said this of him—that he never used that word.