"On the doorstep of your old place. I was rather busy at the time fighting Edward Merrill."She stopped, looking at him in surprise. "Were you that boy?" "I was that boy.""You fought him to help a little ragged girl. She was a foreigner.""I've forgotten why I fought him. The reason I remember the occasion is that I met then for the first time two of my friends."She claimed a place immediately. "Who was the other one?" "Captain Chunn."Presently she bubbled into a little laugh. "How did the fight come out? My nurse dragged me into the house.""Don't remember. I know the school principal licked me next day. I had been playing hookey."They made another turn of the deck before she spoke again.
"So we're old acquaintances, and I didn't know it. That was nearly eighteen years ago. Isn't it strange that after so long we should meet again only last week?"Jeff felt the blood creep into his face. "We met once before, Miss Frome.""Oh, on the street. I meant to speak."
"So did I."
"When?"
With his eyes meeting hers steadily Jeff told her of the time she had found him in the bushes and mistaken him for a sick man. He could see that he had struck her dumb. She looked at him and looked away again.
"Why do you tell me this?" she asked at last in a low voice. "It's only fair you should know the truth about me."They tramped the circuit once more. Neither of them spoke. The trumpeter's bugle call to breakfast rang out.
At the bow she stopped and looked down at the waters they were furrowing. It was a long time before she raised her head and met his eyes. The color had whipped into her cheeks, but she put her question steadily.
"Are you telling me. . . that I must lose my friend?" "Isn't that for you to say?""I don't know." She faltered for words, but not the least in her intention. "Are you--what I have always heard you are?""Can you be a little more definite?" he asked gently. "Well--dissipated! You're not that?""No. I've trodden down the appetite. I'm a total abstainer." "And you're not. . . those worse things that the papers say?" "No.""I knew it." Triumph rang in her voice. She breathed a generous trust. To know him for a true man it was necessary only to look into his fearless eyes set deep in the thin tanned face. It was impossible for anything unclean to survive with his humorous humility and his pervading sympathy and his love of truth. "I didn't care what they said. I knew it all the time."Her sweet faith was a thing to see with emotion. He felt tears scorch the back of his eyes.
"The thing you know is bad enough."
"Oh, that! That is nothing . . . now. It doesn't matter."Lieutenant Beauchamp emerged from a saloon and bore down upon them.
"Mrs. Van Tyle has sent me to bring you to breakfast, Miss Frome.
Mornin', Mr. Farnum."
"And I'm ready for it, We've been round the deck ever so many times. Haven't we, Mr. Farnum?"She nodded lightly to Jeff and walked away with the Englishman. The sunshine of her warm vitality was like quicksilver in Farnum's veins. What a gallant spirit, at once delicate and daring, dwelt in that vivid slender form! A snatch of Chesterton came to his mind:
Her face was like an open word When brave men speak and choose, The very colors of her coat Were better than good news.
"It is the hour of man: new purposes, Broad shouldered, press against the world's slow gate; And voices from the vast eternities Publish the soul's austere apostolate.
Man bursts the chains that his own hands have made; Hurls down the blind, fierce gods that in blind years He fashioned, and a power upon them laid To bruise his heart and shake his soul with fears." --Edwin Markham.
