I couldn't speak, but I could laugh. I felt as if my fairy G.o.dmother had taken me to a moving-picture show--where one scene was from Dante's _Inferno_ and the next one was from a novel by the d.u.c.h.ess.

"There'd be Italy----" Captain Macauley began, but I shrank back.

"Not Italy!" I begged. "I couldn't go to Italy now."

"Why?"

"Because you'd want me to write a lot of sentimental stuff from there--and I'm not sentimental--now."

He smiled.

"Italy is the land of lovers," he whispered, his eyes twinkling over some 1870 recollection. "You must be in love with _somebody_ when you're in Italy--and you can no more hide it than you can hide nettle-rash."

"I don't want to go there," I said stiffly.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Well, can't you speak?"]

"Well, you wouldn't have to!" he answered readily. "This steamer ticket reads from New York to Liverpool."

"Liverpool?" I repeated, as blankly as if geography hadn't been my favorite book at school--to eat apples behind.

"And Hudson suggested, since you showed last night that you were keen on getting the news of the hour, that you'd likely succeed in a new line in England. We've been surfeited on Westminster Abbey and the lakes, so we want _news_! Coal strikes and suffragettes--and other curses!"

"News?"

"Instead of mooning around Hampstead Heath listening to the newest scandal about George Romney and his lady friend, stay strictly in the twentieth century and get in line with the militants. Describe how they address crowds from cart-tails."

"I see," I said slowly.

But in my attempts to see I think I must have pa.s.sed my left hand across my forehead. At all events, he caught sight of its ringless state.

"Grace!" he exclaimed, catching my fingers roughly and scrutinizing the little pallid circle left by the ring's long contact--sometimes the healthiest, sometimes the deadliest pallor that female flesh is heir to! "Does this mean that you've broken off with Guilford Blake?"

"Yes."

His face grew grave.

"Then, child, I beg your pardon for talking so glibly about your going away!--I didn't know."

"But it isn't that--it's not that I'm worrying over now," I explained forlornly. "And Guilford's not hurt! Please don't waste sympathy on him. He'll be glad, when the first shock gets over, for I've tormented him unmercifully."

"Then--what is it?" he asked, very gently.

I drew away my hand.

"It's--something _else_! And please don't change your mind about sending me abroad! I'd like very much to go away from here. Anywhere except to Italy."

He reached over and patted my bereft hand affectionately.

"So the something else is the same sort of something, after all?"

"Perhaps."

"Then run along and begin getting ready," he said. "Get clothes in your head--and salt-sprayed decks on moonlight nights, and wild adventures."

I smiled.

"That's right! Smile! I _can't_ send out a representative with a broken leg--and I'd prefer not sending out one with a broken heart."

I turned away then, struggling fiercely with something in my throat, but just for an instant.

"Broken heart!" I repeated scornfully. "It's not that bad. You mustn't think I'm such a fool."

"Well," he said briskly, "whatever it is, cut it out! And, believe me, my dear, a steamer trunk is the best possible grave for unrequited love."

CHAPTER XV

THE JOURNEY

Personally, I am of such an impatient disposition that I can't bear to read a chapter in a book which begins: "Meanwhile----" Life is too short for meanwhiles! But, since the Oldburgh epoch of my career has pa.s.sed, and the brilliant new epoch has a sea-voyage before it--and crossing the ocean is distinctly a "meanwhile" occupation--I have decided to mark time by taking extracts from my green leather voyage book, with the solid gold clasp and the pencil that won't write. (The city editor gave me the book.)

The first entry was made at the breakfast table in an unnecessarily smart New York hotel. That's one bad feature about having a newspaper pay your traveling expenses! You can't have the pleasure of indulging the vagabondage of your nature--as you can when you're traveling on your hook. The lonely little entry says:

"_Hate_ New York! Always feel countrified and unpopular here!"

But the next one was much better. It reads:

"_Love_ the sea, whose princ.i.p.al charm is the sky above it!

The one acceptable fact about orthodox Heaven is that it's up in the sky. You couldn't endure it if it were in any closer quarters."

Yet between New York and Heaven there lay several unappreciated days--days when I sat for long hours facing strange faces and hearing a jumbled jargon about "barth" hours, deck chairs and miscarried roses. By the way, a strange trick of fate had filled my own bare little stateroom with flowers. I say a trick of fate, because some of them were for Pauline Calhoun, whose New York friends had heard of her proposed journey, but not of her accident, and some of them were addressed to me. I could understand the Pauline blossoms, but those directed to Miss Grace Christie were mystifying--very. But I accepted them with hearty thanks, and the time I spent wondering over them kept me from grieving over the fact that the Statue of Liberty was the only person on the horizon whose face I had ever seen before; and they kept me feeling like a prima donna for half a week.

"Henry Walker couldn't have sent them," I pondered the first day, as the big, big box was deposited inside my door. "He's not such a close friend, even though he is the Hiram Walkers' son--and then, New York law students never have any money left over for orchids."

I enumerated all the other people I happened to know in New York at that time, all of them there for the purpose of "studying" something, and not for the purpose of buying vast quant.i.ties of the highest-priced flower blown, and the mystery only loomed larger.

Still, the question could not keep me entirely occupied between meals, and on the very day we sailed, before we had got into the s.p.a.ce where the union of the sea and sky seem to shut out all pettiness, I got to feeling very sorry for myself. Thinking to get rid of this by mingling with humanity, I went down into the lounge, where I was amazed to find dozens of other women sitting around feeling sorry for themselves. It was not an inspiring sight, so after a vain attempt to read, I curled my arms round a sofa cushion in the corner of the big room and turned my face away from the world in general. The next communication I received was rather unexpected. I heard a brisk voice, close beside me exclaim:

"My word! A great big girl like you crying!"

It was an English voice--a woman's, or rather a girl's, and as I braced up indignantly I met the blue-gray eyes of a fresh-faced young Amazon bent toward my corner sympathetically.

"I'm not crying," I denied.

She turned directly toward me then, and I saw a surprised smile come over her face.