Adventure stories; Islands -- Fiction; Journalists -- Fiction; Love stories; Science fiction; South Pacific Ocean -- Fiction
She came down the dismantled room to meet him, smiling a little and
very pale but, St. George thought, even more beautiful than she had
been the day before. She was dressed for walking and had on a sober
little hat, and straightway St. George secretly wondered how he
could ever have approved of anything so flagrant as a Gainsborough.
She lifted her veil as they sat down, and St. George liked that. To
complete his capitulation she turned to a little table set before
the bowing flames of juniper branches in the grate.
"This is breakfast," she told him; "won't you have a cup of tea and
a muffin? Aunt Medora will be back presently from the chemist's."
For the first time St. George blessed Mrs. Hastings.
"You are really leaving to-day, Miss Holland?" he asked, noting the
little ringless hand that gave him two lumps.
"Really leaving," she assented, "at noon to-day. Mr. Frothingham
sails with us, and his daughter Antoinette, who will be a great
comfort to me. The prince doesn't know about her yet," she added
naïvely, "but he must take her."
St. George nodded approvingly. Unless all signs failed, he
reflected, Yaque had some surprises in store at the hands of the
daughter of its sovereign.
"Where does the prince appoint?" he asked.
He listened in entire disapproval while she told him of the place
below quarantine where they were to board the submarine. The prince,
it appeared, had sent his servant early that morning to assure them
that all was in readiness, a bit of oriental courtesy which made no
impression upon St. George, though it explained the prompt
withdrawal from 19 McDougle Street. When she had finished, St.
George rose and stood before the fire, looking down at her from a
world of uncertainty.
"I don't like it, Miss Holland," he declared, and hesitated, divided
between the desire to tell her that he was going too, and the fear
lest Mrs. Hastings should arrive from the chemist's.
Olivia made a gesture of throwing it all from her.
"Have a muffin--do," she begged. "This is my last breakfast in
America for a time--let me have a pleasant memory of it. Mr. St.
George, I want--oh, I want to tell you how greatly I appreciate--"
"Ah, please," urged St. George, and smiled while he protested, "you
see, I've been very selfish about the whole matter. I'm selfish now
to be here at all when, I dare say, you've no end of things to do."
"No," Olivia disclaimed, "I have not," and thus proved that she was
a woman of genius. For a less complex woman always flutters through
the hour of her departure. Only Juno can step from the clouds
without packing a bag and feeding the peacocks and leaving, pinned
to an asphodel, a note for Jupiter.
"Then tell me what you are going to do in Yaque," he besought.
"Forgive me--what are you going to do all alone there in that
strange land, and such a land?"
He divined that at this she would be very brave and buoyant, and he
was lost in anticipative admiration; when she was neither he admired
more than ever.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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