"Muriel!"

His eyes were so horrified that she hung her head.

"Oh, it's wrong; I know it's wrong," she said. "But, oh, if you knew how afraid I was of this and how I hate and how--O, Jim, Jim!"

She tottered forward, and his arms received her.

"Muriel, my dear wife," he said. "My own dear little girl, to think that when G.o.d has put a life into our keeping, you----Why, Muriel, that is murder!"

That word won Stainton's victory. Muriel succ.u.mbed. For her it was like the safe pa.s.sing of one of those physical crises when the patient had rather die than face the pain of further living; for him it was the sealing of his happiness.

IX

ANOTHER ROAD

It was a few days later that Muriel, the reconciled, decided that she wanted to leave Aiken.

"Don't you think," she asked, for she had come unconsciously often to use phrases characteristic of Jim, "that a change of scene would be good for us both?"

Stainton had not thought so. He had wandered so much in his life that, now wandering was no longer a necessity of life, he was tired of it.

Besides, he was eminently satisfied with Aiken.

"I don't know," he said. "I think it's splendid here. Haven't we been--aren't you happy, dear?"

Muriel was looking out of the window of their hotel sitting-room.

"Of course I'm happy," she said in a low voice. "At least," she added, "I know I ought to be, and I know I never knew what happiness was till I had you. It was only that I thought it would be--perhaps it would be good for me--now--if we travelled."

Stainton cursed himself for a negligent brute.

"What a beast I am!" he said, his arm encircling her waist. "We shall go wherever you want, and we shall go to-morrow."

Muriel smiled ruefully.

"Perhaps," she submitted, "the real reason is only that I've always wanted so to travel and have never had the chance before."

But Stainton would hear of no reason but her first. He upbraided himself again for his stupidity in not guessing her need before she could have given it expression.

"I've been cruel to you!" he declared.

She stopped him with a swift embrace.

"You're never anything," she contritely vowed, "but just darling to me.

I only thought----"

"I know, I know. Where shall we go, Muriel? How about France? I ought to see that syndicate, you know: I ought to meet those men personally. Then there's Paris. I have always longed for Paris myself, and now I shall have you for my guide there."

"Your guide, Jim?"

"Well, you speak French like a book, and I have forgotten nearly all of the little I ever learned."

"I speak school-French," Muriel corrected him.

"At any rate," he a.s.sured her, "yours is fluent, and I can only stammer in the language. Then, too," he went on, "there will be the trip across.

That will be good for you. Sea air ought to be good for you." She winced, and so he hurried to add: "I think I need a bracer, too.--Are you a good sailor, Muriel?"

"I don't know. I've never been on the ocean. Are you?"

"I used to be." His eyes darkened. "It's a good many years since I have tried the water. But I know I shall be all right. I am in such splendid shape. Where is a newspaper? Wait a minute; I'll ring for one. Aren't you glad for newspapers now? They carry shipping advertis.e.m.e.nts, you see. We'll look up the sailings. We have found our first five heavens in America; we must find the sixth in France, and then we must come back here so that our seventh will happen on American soil."

Considering the fact that he did not wish to go, he was self-sacrificingly energetic. He was so energetic that they left Aiken on the next morning and, three days later, were aboard their steamer.

The Newberrys were out of town, still enjoying the rest that they had earned by settling Muriel for life. George Holt was, however, there and had come all the way to Hoboken to see them off.

"And as a German steamship captain once said to me when I asked him to lunch with me at my club," explained Holt, "it's a terribly long way from Hoboken to America."

"It was good of you to come," said Muriel, while the crowd of second-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers and the friends of pa.s.sengers jostled about the first-cla.s.s promenade deck. "Don't you wish you were coming along?"

"Better," said Stainton, already in his steamer cap.

"Thanks, no," said Holt, and then, as the siren blew: "If you'd asked my advice before you bought your tickets, old man, I'd have told you: 'Don't go to sea; but if you do go, don't play cards; but if you do play cards, cut the cards. They'll cheat you anyhow, but it'll take longer.'"

He waved a plump farewell and bared a bald head and waddled down the gang-plank. The band began to play, and Stainton and his wife went to their stateroom to unpack: they were travelling without a maid because Muriel had said something about wanting to secure one in France.

By sunrise next morning the _Friedrich Barbarossa_ was racing through the grey Atlantic with even speed. It was late winter--it was really early spring--and she had already encountered a storm and heavy seas, but the lean ocean express dove through the former and rode the latter as easily as if she had been a railway train running on tried rails along a perfect roadbed. There was no reason in the world why anybody should be sick aboard her; few others were sick; yet, Stainton, on that second day out, remained below.

He could not account for it. He did not like to confess it. He especially hated to confess, when he awoke to see his wife putting the finishing touches to her toilet in the far corner of their big stateroom. But this was manifestly a case where discretion must triumph over valour: he no sooner got to his feet than he got off them again.

"It's no use," he sighed. "I don't know what it was. I wish they didn't have such good dinners on this boat, for it must have been something I ate."

Muriel was all consolation.

"Let me ring for the steward to bring your breakfast here," she said.

"Not if you don't want to kill me! Don't mention food again, please--I wonder if that lobster were just fresh."

She insisted for a long time that she would remain below with him, but he overruled her. He said that the open air would be good for her, even if she did not seem to need it, and he meant that, although he meant also--what he dared not say--that he wanted to struggle alone with his malady. Finally, therefore, Muriel descended to the big dining saloon alone and surprisedly found herself breakfasting with enjoyment, in spite of her husband's absence.

She walked the long sweep of the promenade deck and sat for a while in her steamer chair, next Jim's, where, for a few beautiful hours on the evening before, Jim had sat with her. She read a little from a frothy novel that fell short of the realities of love as she knew it, and failed to touch on that great reality which still so heavily oppressed her; and she watched the long, oily swell of the now green waters, beating to crests of foam, here and there, and forming an horizon-line for all the world like distant mountain-peaks seen, as Stainton had so often seen such peaks, from a peak that is higher than them all. She went to look after Jim every quarter of an hour, but, just before the band began to play on deck and the deck-stewards came smilingly about with their trays of bouillon and sandwiches, she found him sleeping and resolved not again to disturb him. She knew that she was very lonely, but she lunched on herring salad, clam chowder, farced turkey-wings, oysterplant menagere, succotash, biscuit j.a.ponais and nougat parfait.

She had finished and was sitting idly at her table watching the awkward motions with which a line of otherwise commonplace pa.s.sengers walked by on their way upstairs, when her notice was caught by a man whose gait had all the certainty of a traveller upon a level road.

He was tall and slender, with a figure altogether built for grace and agility; but what especially impressed her was his air of abounding youth. His face was, in fact, that of a mere boy--a boy not five years her senior. It was a perfect oval, that face, flushed with health and alight with freshness. Even the fiercely waxed little blond moustache above its full red lips failed to give it either age or experience, and the clear eyes, intensely blue, looked on all they met with the frank curiosity of the young that are in love with life. They met Muriel's own interested scrutiny and, when they answered it with an honest smile, whipped a sudden blush into her pale cheeks.

Muriel hastened from the saloon. She went to look after Jim; but Jim still slept.