She shot a glance at him. He was leaning forward in his chair, his eyes fixed on the floor thinking, in a warm tumult of desire, of the adventure. He saw the boat bounding through the fresh green wave-tops into the deeper blue of the Ægean, he steering, with his arm around her form which would be enfolded in that same big coat, making a dash for freedom.
And as she patted his arm gently, she knew he was not thinking of her save as a protagonist in a romantic episode. For to ask her to go to England was, from her point of view, the reverse of a dash for freedom. In her clear, cold, limited mentality, equipped only with casual and fragmentary tales told by the ignorant or the prejudiced products of mid-European culture, England was the home of debased ideals and gloomy prisons, of iron-hard creeds and a grasping cunning avarice. Her mercenaries were devoted to the conquest and destruction of all that made life beautiful and gay. Out of her cold wet fogs her legions came to despoil the fair places of the earth. And his fidelity, his avowed abandonment of the sentiments of the past, inspired her more with wonder and delight than a reciprocal passion. For she was under no illusions as to her own destiny. She, too, knew this would not last for ever. Her quick mind took in all the fantastic possibilities of his plan, and she perceived immediately the necessity of giving her consent. He must be kept in this mood of exalted happiness. Intuitively she knew that she herself fed on that mood, in which he rose superior to the normal level of his days. And in spite of her dismay at the mere thought of going out again upon the sea, leaving everything she understood and loved, leaving a land of whose spirit and atmosphere she was a part, she asked him when he wanted to go.
"Not yet," he replied, still gazing at the ground, and she looked at him with amazement. She could hardly repress an exclamation at his credulity. He actually believed she would go.
"And we will take all our money?" she suggested.
"Yes, of course," he agreed absently. It was part of his happiness to put everything in her hands. There was for him a supremely sensuous delight in the words, "It is all for you. Take it. Without you, it is of no use to me." He was unable to imagine a more complete surrender, nor could he believe that a woman would accept it save at the price of integrity. Evanthia was like that. Money was never her preoccupation, but she never forgot it. She had none of the futilities of book-education filling her mind like dusty and useless furniture, so that her consciousness of money was as clear and sharp as her consciousness of food or pain. And a sudden perception of his faith in her, his profound absorption in his own romantic illusions, struck her to a puzzled silence, which he took for assent and sympathy. She looked away from him and out across the sea. It was too easy.
"Evanthia," he whispered, and she turned her full, direct untroubled gaze upon him with a swift and characteristic movement of the chin.
"I love you," he muttered and touched her arm with his lips in a gesture of adoration. She looked at him with glowing amber eyes. Sometimes he almost terrified her with the violence of his passionate abnegation. She had never seen anything like it before. He became gloomy with love, she noted; and her quick wit transfused the thought into a presentiment. She would break the spell of his infatuation with a quick movement and lure him back to earth with a smile. She laughed now as he touched her.
"Tell me," he said, "you wish to come to England with me?"
"Ah, yes!" she sighed sweetly, nestling against him. "You an' me, in England."
"Some time next week I'll be ready," he said. "You must get plenty of food for the boat. And the money. Bring that."