"Yes," drawled Grenville, in his old dry way, "great facilities here for manufacturing nights---- I wired Gerald from Colombo."
For a moment Elaine was puzzled by this wholly irrelevant remark. Then her heart began to rock uneasily.
"Wired I was fetching you home, after unavoidable delay."
She recognized the difference between the way that she and he had expressed the principal fact. She felt herself, as it were, already surrendered to a man grown singularly foreign to her nature. It seemed to her incredible that Sidney and she should ever again be parted, or work out their several destinies in any manner save together--especially after all he had said and even done.
"Was that--all you said?" she asked him, faintly.
"No. I said I'd be best man--or something of the sort."
Elaine felt something leaden go down to the point of her heart.
"You wanted him to know that you had no idea---- You wanted Gerald to understand----" She could not finish her sentence. Her face was hotly flaming, but at least she could turn it away.
"It was barely his right to know that we were coming. I could do no less, as you'll certainly agree."
His speeches were constrained, unnatural, as Elaine had instantly felt. Her own were scarcely less embarrassed--after all these months when their entire world had comprised themselves alone. It seemed a monstrous error that anything but free, unfettered companionship and candor should exist between them now.
"I know," she said. "Of course." She added, after a moment, "It seems so peculiar, that's all--to--resume as we were before."
He was looking at his fist, for no good reason in the world.
"It is what you have hoped for every day."
"To get away from the Dyaks--why, of course."
Another silence supervened. After three unsuccessful efforts at speech, Elaine at last found the voice and the courage for a question:
Grenville spread out his fingers, for further inspection.
"I probably shouldn't have suggested it otherwise."
She turned upon him impulsively. "Sidney, are you absolutely honest?"
"Oh, I wouldn't trouble old Diogenes to get out of his grave and look me up," he answered, in his customary spirit, "but I've got a faint idea what honor means."
How well she knew his various manners of evasion! Her heart was pounding furiously. She leaned with all her weight against the rail, as if for fear he must hear its clamorous confessions.