"Come up on deck!" whispered Charlie in an eager undertone. "There's no one there, and the night is divine."
Molly Erie looked at the strange figure in fancy-dress beside her and laughed aloud. She had not allowed Charlie a
tete-a-tete for many days, but she felt that he could scarcely attempt to be sentimental in that costume.
She went with him, therefore, thinking what a pretty girl he would have made.
Charlie led her to the deck-rail. His ridiculous figure was less obtrusively absurd in the dim light. His laughing voice, lowered half-confidently, half-reverently, sounded less inconsequent than was its wont.
Suddenly he turned to her and spoke with wholly unexpected vehemence.
"I can't keep it in," he said. "You've got to know it. Molly, I love you most awfully. You do know it, I believe, without being told. Why do you always run away and hide when I try to speak?"
He spoke quickly, jerkily. She glanced at him with a nervous movement as she drew back. He was not laughing for once, yet she fancied there was the shadow of a smile quivering about his face. Possibly it was an illusion. The dim light made everything indefinite. But the suspicion roused in her in full strength her prejudice against him. She drew back deliberately, and her anger grew from scorn to cruelty during the moments that intervened between his question and her answer.
"You have chosen a very appropriate occasion," she remarked icily at length. "Do you imagine yourself irresistible when playing the fool, I wonder?"
He faced round on her.
"I have taken the only opportunity I could get," he said. "I am a slave of circumstance. If I had come to you in rational costume you would not have consented to sit out with me."
There was a ring of laughter in his explanation. He did not take her anger seriously, then. Molly quivered with indignation. She would speedily show him his mistake.
"You think, then," she said, "that this buffoonery is too amusing to be foregone? I am afraid I do not agree with you."
She paused. Charlie had given a great start of surprise. She could see the astonishment on his boyish face under the white mantilla he wore.
"Oh, look here!" he exclaimed impetuously. "You have got the wrong side of everything. It isn't buffoonery. I don't play with sacred things. I'm in earnest, Molly. Can't you see it? What do you take me for?"
She heard the note of honesty in his voice and shifted her batteries.
"You may be--for a moment," she said, scorn vibrating in every word she uttered. "But you will soon get over it, you know. By to-morrow, or even sooner, all danger will be over."
"Stop!" exclaimed Charlie. For the first time in all her dealings with him he spoke sternly, as a man might speak, and Molly started at his tone. "You are making a mistake," he said more quietly. "I am not the superficial ass you take me for."
"I have only your word for that," she returned, striking without pity because for a second he had startled her out of her contemptuous attitude.
He looked at her in silence, and again her indignation arose full-armed against him. How dared he--this clown in woman's clothes--speak to her at such a moment of that which she rightly held to be the holiest thing on earth?
"How can you expect me to believe you?" she demanded. "You tell me you are in earnest. But you know as well as I do that that is a mere figure of speech. You are never in earnest. You play all day long. You will do it all your life. You never do anything worth mentioning. Other people do the work. You simply skim the surface of things. You are merely a looker-on."
"A very intelligent looker-on, though," said Charlie, in a tone she did not wholly understand.
"And if I don't do anything worth doing, it is possibly lack of opportunity, isn't it? I can do many things, from driving engines to playing skittles. Take a man for what he is, not for what he does! It is the only fair estimate. Otherwise the blatant fools get all the honey."
Molly uttered a scornful little laugh.
"This is paltry," she exclaimed. "A man's actions are the actual man. He can make his own opportunities. No, Mr. Cleveland. You will never convince me of your intrinsic worth by talking."
She paused, as it were, involuntarily. Again that startled feeling of uncertainty was at her heart. There was a momentary silence. Then Charlie made her an odd, jerky bow, and without a single word further turned and left her.
Quaint as was his attire, ungainly as were his movements, there was in his withdrawal a touch of dignity, even a hint of the sublime; and Molly could not understand it.
She paced the length of the deck and sat down to regain her composure. The interview had left her considerably ruffled, even ill at ease.