She arrived alone in about half-an-hour. There was something so fragrant in her presence, so flower-like in her aspect, that she could not approach you but that it was as though she brought a nosegay with her whose perfume had a sweetness for every sense of the body. We had not been long together, yet already I might have guessed what had happened with me by noticing in myself the impatience with which I desired her company, the repeated glances I would send at the companion hatch if I expected her on deck, the very comfortable feeling of satisfaction, the emotion indeed of quiet delight that possessed me when I had her snug by my side in her chair, with no one to break in upon us but Wilfrid, who troubled us very little in this way. I remember this morning when I took the novel off her lap to see what progress she had made in it, thinking, as my glance went in a smile from the mark in the middle of chapter the third to her eyes, in which lay a delicate light of laughter, that before long we should be having the weather of the tropics, the radiant ivory of the equinoctial moon, the dew-laden stillness of the equatorial calm, and that there might come night after night of oceanic repose for us to enjoy—and enjoy alone; but I almost started to the fancy, for it was a sort of secret recantation, a quiet confession of my heart to my reason that though to be sure this voyage was to be viewed as a goose-chase, I was beginning to feel willing that it should not be so brief as I was quite lately trusting it would prove. No wonder the old poets represented love as a kind of madness, seeing that a man who suffers from this disorder will, like a madman, experience twenty different moods in an hour.
‘You do not appear to find the dukes and earls of this star-and-garter novel very engaging company,’ said I, placing the book in her lap again.
‘It is a good sort of novel to dream over,’ said she; ‘the moment I look at it I find my mind thinking of something else.’
‘A pity Wilfrid cannot read,’ said I, ‘but his mind, like the poet’s eye, glances too much. There are two unfailing tests of brain power: the appreciation of humour and the capacity of concentration.’
‘Might not a very clever man laugh at a very silly joke?’ she asked.
‘Yes, but his laugh will be of a different sort from a stupid fellow’s at the same joke. Where did you leave Wilfrid?’
‘In the cabin. Muffin came up to me just now, apparently on his way to his master, and begged me in a most strange, suppliant, hollow way to implore you not to allow Sir Wilfrid to suspect that the handwriting was a trick; “for,” said the man, “if he gets that notion into his head he will suspect me, and then, miss,” he said, “the baronet might take my life, for if he’s scarcely responsible for what he does when he’s in a good temper, what would he not be capable of when he’s in a dreadful passion?” This was in effect what he said. His language and manner are not to be imitated. I told him very coldly that neither of us was likely to tell Sir Wilfrid, not because we should not be very pleased to see him punished by his master as he deserved, even though it came to shooting him,’ she exclaimed, lifting her eyes to mine with roguish enjoyment of Muffin’s terror, ‘but because we were anxious that Sir Wilfrid should be spared the humiliation of the discovery.’
‘Muffin will be out of this end of the ship before noon,’ said I.
‘What have you arranged?’
‘His name will be entered in the articles as a boy, that is, as a sailor below the grade of an ordinary seaman.’