He was looking at me when he said it, and he looked a
good deal more than he said. Then he went away, and poor Pop died. Of
course I couldn't write and tell him, and I suppose he was too proud to
write before he'd done what he undertook to do, and I, like most
girl-fools in the same place would have done, thought that he'd given
the whole thing up and just looked upon the trip as a sort of interlude
in globe-trotting, and thought no more about Pop's ideas and inventions
than he did about his daughter."
"Very natural, of course," said Mrs. Van Stuyler, somewhat mollified by
the subdued passion which Zaidie had managed to put into her commonplace
words; "and so as you thought he had forgotten you and was finding a
wife in his own country, and a possible husband came over from that same
country with a coronet----"
"That'll do, Mrs. Van, thank you," interrupted Miss Zaidie, bringing her
daintily-shod foot down on the deck this time with an unmistakable
stamp. "We'll consider that incident closed if you please. It was a
miserable, mean, sordid business altogether; I am utterly, hopelessly
ashamed of it and myself too. Just to think that I could ever----"
Mrs. Van Stuyler cut short her indignant flow of words by a sudden
uplifting of her eyelids and a swift turn of her head towards the
companion way. Zaidie stamped again, this time more softly, and walked
away to have another look at the clouds.
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