"Oh," laughed Muriel, for she was already condemning her annoyance as childishness, "it doesn't matter, because it is so absurd. Only, what gave you such an impression?"
"The impression that he was elderly: what gave you that?"
"I do not know," he said. "I thought that--I thought that, before we sailed, on the deck here I had seen him with you. You and two American gentlemen I thought I saw: one young and stout. I thought the gentleman young and stout went ashore. Perhaps not. Perhaps it was the other that went ashore. Perhaps that was your father."
There was a moment's silence. Muriel looked intently at the ragged horizon.
"The stout man was Mr. Holt," she said at last. "He is a friend of mine--of ours."
"Ah?" said von Klausen, disinterestedly polite.
"My husband," said Muriel, "is _not_ elderly."
"I ask his pardon," said von Klausen. He produced his bow again. He remained quite at his ease, but his manner implied a courteous wonder at any person's shame of his years. "He is then----"
"He is not so much over forty," lied Muriel, without the remotest idea why she should be thus untruthfully communicative.
Von Klausen ever so slightly turned his head away. She was immediately sure that he did it to conceal a smile.
"That is not old," she hotly contended. She made up her mind now that she did not like this graceful young foreigner. "And Jim is not so old as his age," she continued--"not nearly. He has lived half his life in our Great West, and he is as strong as a lion--and as brave."
She felt the folly of her remark as she made it, but von Klausen gave no sign of sharing that feeling. He settled himself comfortably in Jim's chair. She saw that his face was wholly innocent, his eyes only politely eager.
"Tell me of him, please," he said. "I have heard of your brave Westerners, as you call them, in your United States. I met, once in Washington, a Senator from Texas, but he did not seem to me quite--quite----Pray tell me of your husband, dear lady."
She was amazed to find that, offhand, she could not do this. She started twice and twice stopped, wondering what, after all, there was to say. Then, with a vigorous concentration, she laid hold of all that her aunt and uncle had told her of her husband, all that Holt was authority for, all that the Sunday supplement of the newspapers had printed. She narrated how he had rescued the innocent runaway from the lynching party at Grand Joining, how he had saved the lives of his camp mates during the spotted fever epidemic at Sunnyside; she told of the shooting in Alaska, the filibustering expedition, of Jim's slaying with a knife the grizzly bear that was about to strip Holt's flesh from his bones; she gave in detail the story of Jim's descent into the shaft of the "Better Days" mine, and what she had not learned she supplied to the history of the train robbers on the Rio Grande. It was all deliberate boasting, and when she ended, she felt a little ashamed.