CHAPTER VII

Continued

Meanwhile, with a growing sense of shame, Aileen confessed to herself that she was enjoying herself exceedingly. From a distance, she had despised shuffleboard, as a game beneath her notice. In the same way, she had disdained the bluff and burly Sedalians, pronouncing them totally impossible. Now she was finding the game by no means the easy thing she had supposed; her lack of skill roused her ambition to conquer it at any cost. As to the Sedalians, she found their downright talk, their forcible phrases, strangely attractive, all the more so from their absolute unlikeness to the speech she heard above her own New England cups of tea.

Accordingly, in the rests between her play, she talked with Price, her partner, about the ship, and the captain, and whether he had noticed the color of the gulfweed on the Saturday afternoon, and why his wife was not a better sailor. She agreed with him, quite contrary to her secret judgment, that it was much better for the absent Mrs. Price to be quiet and on her back in bed; and she accompanied her agreement with precisely the smile that she had given to Clode, two days before. It was not Aileen's fault that the simple sincerity of the man interested her, and that she showed it. The girl was as many-sided as a five-point star. It was not her fault, if one-half of her acquaintances believed her insincere, while the other half, the one measured in the re-entrant angles of her sympathies believed themselves to be the coruscating points.

Stanway, however, crawling deckwards, at high noon, with the shambling tread of one whose morning portion has consisted of alternating layers of ship biscuit and of Mother Sill, ceased to believe at all, and became

utterly agnostic. There in the driving mist, between the life-boats on the one hand and the smoking-room wall upon the other, Miss Aileen Warburton was careering up and down the wet and slippery deck, a driver in her hand. Lined up beside Miss Warburton, moreover, were three of the Sedalians, each armed with a similar driver; and the three Sedalians, as nearly as Stanway's astonished mind could discover, were uttering encouraging plaudits at her play. From the open window of the smoking-room, a steward's head protruded, a human counterpart of a cow gazing placidly, out from above her manger in the stall.

Stanway gazed and glowered. Then finding that Aileen was blissfully unconscious of the disdainful astonishment written on his greeny-yellow countenance, finding, too, the rolling of the ship a bit unsettling to his manliness, he turned upon his heel with what dignity he could muster, and started back downstairs.

In

At the foot of the first of the first flight, he met Clode, apparently bound on the same errand as himself. Furthermore, to judge by the tint of Clode's complexion, Clode's courage was even better than his own. Stanway's present condition, speech was risky. None the less, he tried it. "Going up?" he queried. "Yes. Thought I'd try it." Neither man asked an apology of the other for his curtness. There is

a wonderful free-masonry of understanding, under some conditions. "There's a good breeze." "Miss Warburton up there?" "Yes." "Busy?"

A malevolent gleam came into Stanway's eyes.

She looked so."

"What was she doing?"

Stanway made a perceptible effort to prolong the conversation, just one

moment more. In the end, he accomplished it.

"Playing shuffleboard with those damned Sedalia people."

Then, his endurance spent, he vanished. Later, when his power for coherent thought renewed itself, he rejoiced at the memory of Clode's disgruntled face.

Clode, however, cautiously continued on his way, and came out upon the boat deck to find that, instead of being welcomed and coddled, his appearing was totally ignored. Not only were the deck chairs, for the most part, filled with specimens of humanity as demoralized as was he himself; but his manifest absorption in Aileen and in Aileen alone had not caused the other women to look on him with appreciative eyes. Now, themselves not too impeccable, they yet gazed upon him critically, commented softly upon the tints of his complexion, and murmured that his nose was out of joint. Clode, though, disregarded them completely, stared with accusing eyes at Aileen's unconscious back, stared with disgusted eyes at Aileen's brutally healthy companions, and then essayed to walk down the deck to look on at their game.

Ten feet from Aileen's still unconscious back, the deck steward hailed him affably.

"You're a bit late, sir; but I'll bring you out a cup of broth directly.'

And, before Clode could recover from his wave of total loathing, Aileen remarked to her Sedalian,

"There's nothing in the world so funny to me as a seasick man. Do you know, Mr. Price, I'd really like to try it once, to see if it really is anything but mere imagination. My turn? Good!"

But like his predecessor, Stanway, Clode was vanishing. Unlike Stanway, his later reflections held scanty element of rejoicing.

None the less, luncheon time over and half the afternoon gone by, Clode pluckily made another effort. The rolling of the ship was almost over,

for a smart shower was levelling the waves. It also had well-nigh cleared the decks, and Clode, his hopes high, was making for his chair, when a light laugh fell on his ears, a laugh he had already come to recognize and to claim as his own especial property. He glanced in at the open window of the lounge beside him.

"You say they must touch, either sidewise or cornerwise? How stupid! And which did you say counted more: a full hand or a straight ?"

Side by side at the table underneath the window, both of the impenetrable Englishmen were busy, teaching Aileen to play poker patience.

CHAPTER IX

OU expect to be in Flanders, too, then?"

Clode clasped his hands behind his head.

"Really, Miss Warburton, I am afraid I must confess I have n't many plans. No," for he caught a look in the girl's grey eyes which betrayed her fear lest her companion thought her over-curious; "it's not that I am trying to be reticent. I sailed, without a plan of any sort."

"It's not a business trip, then? We thought-" The girl caught herself up_suddenly.

Before he spoke, Clode paused long enough to register a wonder as to the makeup of the we. The pause lent emphasis to his next words.

"No business trip, Miss Warburton. For a wonder, I am off in search of pleasure."

"I hope you'll find it," she wished him cordially.

"I doubt if I do. After half a lifetime of the other thing, we forget just how and where to look for it." Then he roused himself, physically, as well as mentally. His accent brightened, while he sat up with a jerk. "Anyway I am pledged to stay away for a good four months. At least, whatever the pleasure, it is bound to be interesting. I was twenty-two the last time I came over. Since, I've been living in a

"It was ignominious," he confessed; "totally ignominious in all of its details, especially the last one."

Their eyes met, and laughed, and the sea laughed with them, as well it might. There was no denying that one of the little comedies of shipboard had been played out to a finish the night before, a finish as original as it was unpoetic. For a sodden and uncertain hour of the rainy afternoon, Clode had sat, limp and neglected in his deck chair. Then, warned by the clink of cups that undesirable forms of nutriment were approaching, he had beaten an orderly retreat and buried himself once more within his cabin.

From that safe harbor of refuge, he heard the mess call on the bugle, heard Aileen's light step come down the passage, the only self-respecting, selfreliant step, it seemed to him, in all the passage. He heard Haydock's hail, heard Haydock's prolix and realistic bulletin concerning all the invalids, himself included. Then the door shut behind her. It opened again, though, to admit Marie, opened once more, to be followed by the sound of Aileen's retreating footsteps. Then there was a long, soundless interval, before the step

in

sea.

91

once more came back along the passage. Clode let it come and go. Watch in hand, he waited for a long twenty minutes before he went upstairs. He had braced himself to undergo the lounge; but, to his relieved surprise, he found Aileen curled up in her deck chair under the light, reading industriously. For just a minute, he halted in the doorway, watching her intently. While he watched, his lips shaped themselves to a contented whistling, faint and low, too low for the girl to catch any echo of the familiar theme. In honest ignorance of his scrutiny, she read on, turning a leaf now and then, now and then lifting her head to stare out across the purple The night was warm; but the salt wind swept over her, ruffling her yellow hair and curling it into myriads of little rings and tendrils that gleamed like polished metal in the strong light which streamed upon them from above. It ruffled the rug, too, and the silky scarf about her shoulders, now and then revealing the firm, fine line of her throat, the decisive modelling where the neck rounded to join the shapely shoulders. She was good to look at, Clode told himself contentedly; and he made no effort to find out why it should be a matter of content to him. Instead, fists in pockets, lips still shaped to his favorite melody, he sauntered down the deck and paused before her. "May I?" he asked, with a glance at the chair beside her.

She looked up with a smile.
"Why not?"

He shrugged his shoulders, with an expressive glance down at the tweeds he customarily wore by day.

"I have not on my wedding garment," he confessed.

With the nestling motion of a little child preparing for an extra good time, she tucked her book out of sight, and drew her rug closer around her shoulders.

"Oh, but out here on deck, it does n't matter. You'd better get a rug, though. It is chilly here; and, after the day you" she hesitated; then her half-protecting interest broke