Part 19 (1/2)

She tossed her gauntlets on to a chair. She walked past him towards the window. ”You got my letter?”

”Yes.”

Her face was averted. Her voice had not the bantering note with which she had spoken at her entry.

”You never answered it.”

”Well, I'd just seen you--just before I got it.”

She was looking out of the window. ”Why haven't you been up?”

”Oh--I don't know. I was coming.”

”Well, I had to come,” she said.

He made no reply. He could think of none to make.

II

She turned sharply away from the window and came towards him, radiant again, as at her entry. And in her first bantering tone, ”I know you hate it,” she smiled, resuming her first suggestion, ”me coming here, like this. It makes you feel uncomfortable. You always feel uncomfortable when you see me, Marko. I'd like to know what you thought when they told you I was here--”

He started to speak.

She went on, ”No, I wouldn't. I'd like to know just what you were doing before they told you. Tell me that, Marko.”

”I believe I wasn't doing anything. Just thinking.”

”Well, I like you best when you're thinking. You puzzle, don't you, Marko? You've got a funny old head. I believe you live in your old head, you know. Puzzling things. Clever beast! I wish I could live in mine.” And she gave a note of laughter.

”Where do you live, Nona?”

”I don't live. I just go on”--she paused--”flotsam.”

Strange word to use, strangely spoken!

It seemed to Sabre to drop with a strange, detached effect into the conversation between them. His habit of visualising inanimate things caused him to see as it were a pool between them at their feet, and from the word dropped into it ripples that came to his feet upon his margin of the pool and to her feet upon hers.

III

He took the word away from its personal application. ”I believe that's rather what I was thinking about when you came, Nona. About how we just go on--flotsam. Don't you know on a river where it's tidal, or on the seash.o.r.e at the turn, the ma.s.s of stuff you see there, driftwood and spent foam and stuff, just floating there, uneasily, brought in and left there--from somewhere; and then presently the tide begins to take it and it's drawn off and moves away and goes--somewhere. Arrives and floats and goes. That's mysterious, Nona?”

She said swiftly, as though she were stirred, ”Oh, Marko, yes, that's mysterious. Do you know sometimes I've seen drift like that, and I've felt--oh, I don't know. But I've put out a stick and drawn in a piece of wood just as the stuff was moving off, just to save it being carried away into--well, into that, you know.”

”Have you, Nona?”

She answered, ”Do you think that's what life is, Marko?”

”It's not unlike,” he said. And he added, ”Except about some one coming along with a stick and drawing a bit into safety. I'm not so sure about that. Perhaps that's what we're all looking for--”

He suddenly realised that he was back precisely at the thoughts his mind had taken up on the morning he had met her. But with a degree more of illumination. Two feelings came into his mind, the second hard upon the other and overriding it, as a fierce horseman might catch and override one pursued. He said, ”It's rather jolly to have some one that can see ideas like that.” And then the overriding, and he said with astonis.h.i.+ng roughness, ”But you--you aren't flotsam! How can you be flotsam--the life you've--taken?”

And, lo, if he had struck her, and she been bound, defenceless, and with her eyes entreating not to be struck again, she could not deeper have entreated him than in the glance she fleeted from her eyes, the quiver of her lids that first released, then veiled it.