HALMERS' protests were unavailing. Leila Denman's arguments were both convincing and numerous.
“I am not going to be left alone on this beach imagining all sorts of dreadful things happening to you,” she said. “If there should, I want to be there. They can't be more dreadful than what would happen to me if you didn't come back. I can swim as well as you can. Wait till you see me. I've got my bathing-suit, and I can really help you.”
“There seems to be a mutiny in full progress,” Chalmers answered, “but I've got to quell it. Some one's got to stay on watch here.”
“Pouf!” She dismissed the reason with a charming moue, like the puff of an imaginary cigarette. “We can watch them ever so much better from the lagoon. You are afraid I'm going to be a hindrance—I'm not. You are going to make a little raft, you said, for the things you are going to bring back?”
“Yes, ammunition, some clothes, my charts, the chronometer, and, if I can get away with it, the schooner's compass.”
“You are going to climb aboard and get them?”
“Naturally.”
“And how are you going to load up your raft without help?”
Chalmers laughed.
“Fairly won,” he said. “It would take me ever so much longer by myself. I'll give in—as long as we know there are no sharks. But you must promise to stay in the water.”
“Aye, aye, sir! The mutineers return to duty,” she said gaily.
“Having achieved their point,” he countered.
He marveled at the buoyancy of her spirit, at the sheer pluck of her. That she was not in the least disillusioned concerning the dangers that hourly surrounded them he was assured. Yet, in the face of them all, in the prospect of being left to the vicious whims of Tuan Yuck and Sayers, should he fail her, she was the gay comrade, the gallant “pal” who insisted upon her full share of the perils.
And she trusted him. The thought was an elixir. To its inspiration the subtle alchemy of his body responded, charging the blood with energies that gave new strength to his muscles, invigorating every nerve and sinew till the whole coordinated like the parts of a perfect machine.
Both were heart free, both ripe for the friendly virus with which Cupid tips his arrows, and that ubiquitous godling chuckled at Chalmers's attempts to regulate his passion as the two built their little raft by the light of their fire, the blazing stars and a sinking moon.
The setting could not have been completer for romance. Each was conscious of the proximity of the other and felt little rippling thrills of delight as they came into casual contact over their work. But to Chalmers, the pearls that nestled in her bosom, gaining fresh luster from the magnetism of her young body, seemed as insuperable a barrier between them as if they had been the actual boulders of an impassable wall.
Without conceit, he recognized that both of them were seeped in an exaltation of spirit that made life seem very sweet and free from care, despite their dangers. He was not blind to the fact that Leila shared the emotions that possessed him as their hands met, or that a certain adorable shyness that was both a lure and a promise shone sometimes in her eyes; but he hugged the thought that he would be dishonorable to take any advantage of a mood that might pass, hugged it as the Spartan boy held the fox that gnawed his breast.
She was an heiress; he had nothing ahead but the earnings of a profession to which he was not accredited by nature. So he controlled himself as best he could and checked the growing impulse to tell her how sweet and brave and altogether desirable she was. Once, when the mischievous wind whipped a perfumed strand of her hair across his face, he deliberately went away from her on the idle pretense of looking for more driftwood, though the raft was then complete, and stood dizzily facing the lagoon to fight it out.
“You came pretty close to being a cad,” he told himself. “Another second and you would have kissed her. A fine protector you are for a lonely girl.”
A tiny voice—it was Cupid's—whispered, “She would not have minded.” And he thrust it from him as unworthy. Whereat Cupid, counting his remaining arrows, laughed, knowing well the power of that beneficent venom on their tips, composed of elements allied to hope and youth and health that would crystallize to happiness.