Part 25 (1/2)

”In any case, Miss Hamilton seems to be under the impression that it was nice of you.”

”Nice of me to go away?” and Nasmyth's tone was mildly reproachful.

”One would not resent a desire to save one any little embarra.s.sment.”

”Still,” observed Nasmyth, with an air of reflection, ”the trouble is that I couldn't contrive to keep out of her sight continually even if I wanted to, and”--he lowered his voice confidentially--”as it happens, I don't.”

Mrs. Acton laughed. ”I don't know of any particular reason why you should do that. Violet has probably quite recovered her equanimity and decided on her att.i.tude towards you.” Then she changed the subject abruptly. ”I wonder if I may point out that there has been a change in you, since my husband brought you here. For one thing, you are much more amusing. Even your voice is different.”

Nasmyth bowed. ”But not my hands,” he said; and as he held up one hand, she noticed the scars on it and the coa.r.s.eness of his nails.

”That tells a tale, I think. My dear lady, I scarcely think you quite realize all that you have given me. You have never seen how we lived in the lonely logging camps--packed like cattle in a reeking shed--and you do not know the grim side of our life in the Bush. It would be no great use to tell you that I have now and then limped for days together over the ballast of a railroad track, wondering where my next dollar was to come from. These are the things one could not expect you to understand.”

Mrs. Acton's face softened a little. ”Still, I think my husband does,”

she replied. Then she smiled at him. ”It almost seems to me that you need never go back to that life again unless you like it. I mean, of course, that, for one thing, your uncle has his views concerning you.

He has to some extent taken Mr. Acton into his confidence.”

Nasmyth made no comment, and Mrs. Acton sank down a little further into her long chair. ”The others are down on the beach,” she announced drowsily. ”I really think I was going to sleep when you made your appearance.”

Nasmyth could take a hint, and he strolled away down the veranda stairway and around the edge of the wide clearing in the shadow of the Bush, until he stood looking down upon the sea from the crown of the bluff. Then he felt a little thrill, for some twenty or thirty feet beneath him was a patch of something white in the shadow of the shrubbery. He went down quietly until he stopped, and, stooping, touched Violet Hamilton's shoulder. She looked around with a start, and a faint trace of embarra.s.sment crept into her face at the sight of him.

”Oh,” she said, ”I thought you were in Victoria.”

Nasmyth stretched himself out upon a ledge of rock near her feet.

”Mrs. Acton was good enough to imply that she had been expecting me more or less anxiously for several days,” he rejoined in a tone of reproach. ”In fact, she used the plural p.r.o.noun, which led me to believe that somebody else must have shared her anxiety. She did not, however, point out who it was that she meant.”

”Her husband, in all probability. She could, at least, speak for him.”

Nasmyth appeared to ponder over this, though his heart was beating faster than usual, for the suggestion of confusion which he had noticed in the girl's manner had its significance for him.

”Well,” he conceded, ”it may have been Acton, but I almost ventured to believe she meant somebody else. In any case, I shouldn't like to think you were displeased at my reappearance. If you are, I can, of course, go away again.”

”I am not the only person at Bonavista. Wouldn't anybody else's wishes count--Mr. Acton's, for instance?”

”No,” a.s.serted Nasmyth reflectively. ”At least, not to anything like the same extent.”

Violet laughed. ”The difficulty is that n.o.body can tell how much you really mean. You are so seldom serious.” She cast a quick glance at him. ”You were not like that when you first came here.”

”Then,” said Nasmyth, ”you can blame it on Bonavista. As I have been trying to explain to Mrs. Acton, who made a similar observation, there is glamour in this air. It gets hold of one. I was, no doubt, a tediously solemn person when I left the Bush, but you will remember that soon after I arrived here, you and I sailed out together into the realms of moonlight and mystery. I sometimes feel that I must have brought a little of the latter back with me.”

Violet said nothing for half a minute, during which she lay resting on one elbow, looking down upon the cool, green flas.h.i.+ng of the water a hundred feet below, and again Nasmyth felt a little thrill run through him. She was so very dainty in speech and thought and person, a woman of the world he had once belonged to, and which it now seemed he might enter again. Her delicately chiselled, half-averted face matched the slight but finely moulded figure about which the thin white draperies clung. She turned and looked at him.

”You certainly can't be serious now,” she declared.

”I a.s.sure you that when I mentioned the glamour and mystery, I was never half so serious in my life. They are, after all, very real things.”

He was, as a matter of fact, grimly serious for the moment as he wondered at the change that had come over him. His life in the silent Bush, the struggle with the icy river, and even Laura Waynefleet, who had encouraged him in his work of rehabilitation, had by degrees become no more than a dim, blurred memory. He knew that he could recall it all, but he had no wish to make the effort, for it was more pleasant to hear the sighing of the summer wind about the firs of Bonavista, and wonder languidly what his companion thought.

”I haven't thanked you for taking care of me the day we were left behind on the beach,” said Violet.