Part 22 (1/2)

Captain Ross, turned a little sideways on the cus.h.i.+ons of the skiff, attempted, by looking the girl full in the face, to make the girl look straight back at him. Not a successful method. Olwen's soft bright glance slid away from him even as the phosph.o.r.escence slid away from the oars.

Curtly he demanded, ”You _do_ like candy, after all?”

”I don't call it 'candy.' That's American, or Canadian,” Olwen said with that indifference which was her only idea of Love's camouflage. ”I say, 'chocolate,' or 'sweets.'”

”Is that so?”

”Yes,” said Olwen, looking now at the box that was, as she knew, to become her most precious and inseparable treasure, her first gift--from Him!

As she sat holding it, backed by luminous sky and luminous sea, the little slim Pandora with her casket, he too looked at it between her hands; touched the bow of it.

”That'll do for a hair-ribbon for you, I guess,” he remarked.

All that Olwen could think of to say was ”I don't ever wear any ribbons.”

”Is that so?” retorted Captain Ross maliciously. ”Then what's that little pink tie-thing you've gotten coming out over your coat-collar at the back?”

Precipitately, Olwen's hand went up to the ribbon that was sewn to her Charm, and that, according to the mysterious and osmotic nature of ribbons, had let an end work up and out again. She tucked it in, with the eyes of the two young men upon her little dark, ducking head, and the small hand white in the moonlight.

That moonlight flashed too on the line of Captain Ross's fine teeth. A great alteration had suddenly come over his dour mood. He had two reasons for laughing good-humouredly. One, because he had just given a welcome present (event that always adds to one's good will towards the receiver), and two, because he had scored off the little chit now, with her ribbon! Ha!

His bad temper had vanished as her pretty confusion appeared. Again she dipped her fingers into that gleaming wake; she shook them, dried them against the thick skirt of her coat.

”You've gotten your hands cold now,” said Captain Ross, in a pleased tone, and his left hand caught hold of the fingers of her little chilled right hand as if to verify the fact.

His own was a short and rather stumpy hand, Olwen had often noticed, with beautifully kept nails and with the cus.h.i.+ons of the palm developed and muscular from the double share of work that was put upon it; generally she had seen it held half-closed above the watch-bracelet on a st.u.r.dy wrist. She had never shaken hands with him....

She thought he meant only to touch her fingers and to let them go. But he held them. He held the little soft fingers, in the shadow of her loose cuff and under a fold of her thick coat. They lay, firmly tucked into that clever magnetic left hand of the soldier who had only that one hand to do everything with.

Olwen, a prisoner enraptured with her chain, sat silent and still. She thought, ”I suppose I ought to take my hand away. Oh, need I? No; I can't. He's only holding it to warm it, perhaps. And then if I took it away he might think I thought he thought he was _really_ holding it!”

She sat in the boat that glided through that fairy mere of lambert waves, s.h.i.+mmering with green. Little s.h.i.+vers seemed to start in her elapsed hand and to run up her arm quick as wildfire, and spreading like wildfire through the whole of her slight frame. Yet she was now, as she had promised the Professor that she would be, ”as warm as warm.” Once she moved her hand a little in its prison, but that was only as a bird might stir and nestle in its cosy haunt. The man's clasp tightened a trifle, but she had made no effort to take away the hand that he was describing to himself as ”a little bit of velvet.”

As she a.s.sured herself some time afterwards, ”Well, how _could_ I? How can you possibly take your hand away from a man's who's only got one arm to hold you with?”

The boat sped on ... and the thrills that trembled through the girl did not, surely, leave the man unstirred.

”Well, what about it, Ross?” broke in the making-the-best-of-it voice of little Mr. Brown, resting at last on his oars. ”What about another of those chocolates?”

With one of his quickest movements Captain Ross's hand left the shadow of Olwen's cuff and grabbed the biggest chocolate walnut out of the box.

He crammed it into the other young man's mouth as if it were a gag.

Then, unseen, his hand sought the girl's again, found it, held it close.

The boat sped on through the whispering wildfire....

CHAPTER XIV