Brougham didn't inquire any further. He shook his head and went home.
He found his wife and David sitting hand in hand on the piazza looking
out to sea, with the same blank grave look on both their faces. Yet
they were thinking very different thoughts.
Mrs. Brougham was thinking that she had been strangely stupid not
to know that this was just exactly the way David would do it; but
she added to herself she had allowed her vision to be clouded by her
husband.
David was carefully reviewing the small stock of his technical
knowledge of aëroplanes.
WORSE THAN MARRIED
Miss Wilbur sat up and wrung the water out of her hair. Most of us have
looked about a dinner-table and wondered which of the party would make
the pleasantest companion on a desert island; Juliana had done it often
enough, but now the comic touch was lacking. Far out, hung on some
unknown reef, the prow of the vessel stuck up black and tall, almost
as if she were still pursuing a triumphant course landward, though a
list to starboard betrayed her desperate condition, and a second glance
showed that the waves were breaking over her stern. The heavy swell was
all that was left of the storm. The sun had just risen in a cloudless
sky, above a dark-blue sea. It was perhaps that bright horizontal ray
which had waked Miss Wilbur. It had not disturbed her rescuer, who,
more provident, had hidden his face in his arm.
It seems hardly possible for a young lady to be dragged from her berth
in the dead of night, hauled to the deck, and literally dumped into a
small boat, to be tossed out of the boat and dragged to shore--all by a
man whose face and name were equally unknown. But the more she looked
at the back of that damp head, and the line of those shoulders, the
less familiar did they appear. This was hardly surprising, for since
she and her maid had taken the steamer at Trinidad, she had made so
little effort at _rapprochement_ with her fellow passengers that she
could hardly call any of them to mind--a great German from a banking
house in Caracas; a sunburnt native botanist bound for the Smithsonian;
a little Englishman from the Argentine; these were the only three
figures she could remember. Who was this man? A sailor? A commercial
traveler? Of what standing and what nationality?
She coughed presently: "I wish you'd wake up," she said, "and let me
thank you for saving my life."
The first result of this remark was that the man grunted and buried
his nose deeper in the sand. Then he rolled over, stood up, and
comprehensively hitching up what remained of his trousers, he looked
carefully round the horizon, then at the wall of palm-trees behind
them, and last of all at Miss Wilbur, without the smallest change of
expression.
"Did I save you?" he asked.
"Yes, don't you remember? You caught me up in the dark--"
"I had a notion it was Mrs. Morale's son." Again his eyes sought the
horizon, and he turned to move away, but she arrested him with a
question.