Part 17 (1/2)

While Staniford walked up and down, and scorned and raged at the idea that he had anything to do with the matter, the singing and fluting came to a pause in the cabin; and at the end of the next tune, which brought him to the head of the gangway stairs, he met Lydia emerging. He stopped and spoke to her, having instantly resolved, at sight of her, not to do so.

”Have you come up for breath, like a mermaid?” he asked. ”Not that I'm sure mermaids do.”

”Oh, no,” said Lydia. ”I think I dropped my handkerchief where we were sitting.”

Staniford suspected, with a sudden return to a theory of her which he had already entertained, that she had not done so. But she went lightly by him, where he stood stolid, and picked it up; and now he suspected that she had dropped it there on purpose.

”You have come back to walk with me?”

”No!” said the girl indignantly. ”I have not come back to walk with you!” She waited a moment; then she burst out with, ”How dare you say such a thing to me? What right have you to speak to me so? What have I done to make you think that I would come back to--”

The fierce vibration in her voice made him know that her eyes were burning upon him and her lips trembling. He shrank before her pa.s.sion as a man must before the justly provoked wrath of a woman, or even of a small girl.

”I stated a hope, not a fact,” he said in meek uncandor. ”Don't you think you ought to have done so?”

”I don't--I don't understand you,” panted Lydia, confusedly arresting her bolts in mid-course.

Staniford pursued his guilty advantage; it was his only chance. ”I gave way to Mr. Hicks when you had an engagement with me. I thought--you would come back to keep your engagement.” He was still very meek.

”Excuse me,” she said with self-reproach that would have melted the heart of any one but a man who was in the wrong, and was trying to get out of it at all hazards. ”I didn't know what you meant--I--”

”If I had meant what you thought,” interrupted Staniford n.o.bly, for he could now afford to be generous, ”I should have deserved much more than you said. But I hope you won't punish my awkwardness by refusing to walk with me.”

He knew that she regarded him earnestly before she said, ”I must get my shawl and hat.”

”Let me go!” he entreated.

”You couldn't find them,” she answered, as she vanished past him. She returned, and promptly laid her hand in his proffered arm; it was as if she were eager to make him amends for her harshness.

Staniford took her hand out, and held it while he bowed low toward her.

”I declare myself satisfied.”

”I don't understand,” said Lydia, in alarm and mortification.

”When a subject has been personally aggrieved by his sovereign, his honor is restored if they merely cross swords.”

The girl laughed her delight in the extravagance. She must have been more or less than woman not to have found his flattery delicious. ”But we are republicans!” she said in evasion.

”To be sure, we are republicans. Well, then, Miss Blood, answer your free and equal one thing: is it a case of conscience?”

”How?” she asked, and Staniford did not recoil at the rusticity. This how for what, and the interrogative yes, still remained. Since their first walk, she had not wanted to know, in however great surprise she found herself.

”Are you going to walk with me because you had promised?”

”Why, of course,” faltered Lydia.

”That isn't enough.”

”Not enough?”