The Aloha gently freed herself from the shallow green pocket where she had lain through three eventful days, and slipped out toward the waste of water bound by the flaunting autumn of the west. An island wind, fragrant of bark and secret berries, blew in puffs from the steep. A gull swooped to her nest in a cranny of the basalt. From below a servant came on deck, his broad American face smiling over a tray of glasses and decanters and tinkling ice. It was all very tranquil and public and almost commonplace--just the high tropic seas at the moment of their unrestrained sundown, and the odour of tea-cakes about the pleasantly-littered deck. And for the moment, held by a common thought, every one kept silent. Now that The Aloha was really moving toward home, the affair seemed suddenly such a gigantic impossibility that every one resented every one else's knowing what a trick had been played. It was as if the curtain had just fallen and the lights of the auditorium had flashed up after the third act, and they had all caught one another breathless or in tears, pretending that the tragedy had really happened.
"Promise me something," begged St. George softly, in sudden alarm, born of this inevitable aspect; "promise me that when we get to New York you are not going to forget all about Yaque--and me--and believe that none of us ever happened."
Olivia looked toward the serene mystery of the distance.
"New York," she said only, "think of seeing you in New York--now."
"Was I of more account in Yaque?" demanded St. George anxiously.
"Sometimes," said Olivia adorably, "I shall tell you that you were. But that will be only because I shall have an idea that in Yaque you loved me more."
"Ah, very well then. And sometimes," said St. George contentedly, "when we are at dinner I shall look down the table at you sitting beside some one who is expounding some baneful literary theory, and I shall think: What do I care? He doesn't know that she is really the Princess of Far-Away. But I do."
"And he won't know anything about our motor ride, alone, the night that I was kidnapped, either--the literary-theory person," Olivia tranquilly took away his breath by observing.
St. George looked up at her quickly and, secretly, Olivia thought that if he had been attractive when he was courageous he was doubly so with the present adorably abashed look in his eyes.
"When--alone?" St. George asked unconvincingly.
She laughed a little, looking down at him in a reproof that was all approbation, and to be reproved like that is the divinest praise.