"Oh, is that you?"

"Yes."

"You've been a long time."

"It wasn't an easy job," explained Sam, "getting all that burnt cork off. You've no notion how the stuff sticks. You have to use butter...."

She shuddered.

"Don't!"

"But I did. You have to with burnt cork."

"Don't tell me these horrible things." Her voice rose almost hysterically. "I never want to hear the words burnt cork mentioned again as long as I live."

"I feel exactly the same." Sam moved to her side.

"Darling," he said in a low voice, "it was like you to ask me to meet you here. I know what you were thinking. You thought that I should need sympathy. You wanted to pet me, to smooth my wounded feelings, to hold me in your arms, and tell me that, as we loved each other, what did anything else matter?"

Advertisement..

"I didn't."

"You didn't?"

"No, I didn't."

"Oh, you didn't! I thought you did!" He looked at her wistfully.

"I thought," he said, "that possibly you might have wished to comfort me. I have been through a great strain. I have had a shock...."

"And what about me?" she demanded passionately. "Haven't I had a shock?"

He melted at once.

"Have you had a shock, too? Poor little thing! Sit down and tell me all about it."

She looked away from him, her face working.

"Can't you understand what a shock I have had? I thought you were the perfect knight."

"Yes, isn't it?"

"Isn't what?"

"I thought you said it was a perfect night."

"I said I thought you were a perfect knight."

"Oh, ah!"

A sailor crossed the deck, a dim figure in the shadows, went over to a sort of raised summerhouse with a brass thingummy in it, fooled about for a moment, and went away again. Sailors earn their money easily.

"Yes?" said Sam when he had gone.

"I forget what I was saying."

"Something about my being the perfect knight."

"Yes. I thought you were."

"That's good."

"But you're not!"

"No?"

"No!"

"Oh!"

Silence fell. Sam was feeling hurt and bewildered. He could not understand her mood. He had come up expecting to be soothed and comforted and she was like a petulant iceberg. Cynically, he recalled some lines of poetry which he had had to write out a hundred times on one occasion at school as a punishment for having introduced a white mouse into chapel.




Most Popular