There was nothing conventional in their greeting. “You remembered me!” he said eagerly, in English, thinking of yesterday.
“I shouldn’t deserve to be here if I had forgotten,” she answered meaningly. “Perhaps you forget the sword of the Turk?” she added.
He laughed a little, his cheek flushed with pleasure. “I shouldn’t deserve to be here if I remembered--in the way you mean,” he answered.
Her face was full of pleasure. “The worst of it is,” she said, “I never can pay my debt. I have owed it for eleven years, and if I should live to be ninety I should still owe it.”
His heart was beating hard and he became daring. “So, thou shalt save my life,” he said, speaking in French. “We shall be quits then, thou and I.”
The familiar French thou startled her. To hide the instant’s confusion she turned her head away, using a hand to gather in her hair, which the wind was lifting lightly.
“That wouldn’t quite make us quits,” she rejoined; “your life is important, mine isn’t. You”--she nodded towards the Narcissus--“you command men.”
“So dost thou,” he answered, persisting in the endearing pronoun.
He meant it to be endearing. As he had sailed up and down the world, a hundred ports had offered him a hundred adventures, all light in the scales of purpose, but not all bad. He had gossiped and idled and coquetted with beauty before; but this was different, because the nature of the girl was different from all others he had met. It had mostly been lightly come and lightly go with himself, as with the women it had been easily won and easily loosed. Conscience had not smitten him hard, because beauty, as he had known it, though often fair and of good report, had bloomed for others before he came. But here was a nature fresh and unspoiled from the hand of the potter Life.
As her head slightly turned from him again, he involuntarily noticed the pulse beating in her neck, the rise and fall of her bosom. Life--here was life unpoisoned by one drop of ill thought or light experience.
“Thou dost command men too,” he repeated.
She stepped forward a little from the doorway and beyond him, answering back at him:
“Oh, no, I only knit, and keep a garden, and command a little home, that’s all.... Won’t you let me show you the island?” she added quickly, pointing to a hillock beyond, and moving towards it. He followed, speaking over her shoulder: