d I
recalled some of the good words with which I had been taught to assist
at the Holy Sacrifice--praying at the _Credo_ that as I had become a
child in the bosom of the Church I might live and die in it.

When the service was over I felt more at ease and I emptied my purse, I
remember, partly into the plate and partly to the poor people at the
church door.

It was in this spirit that I returned home in the broad sunshine of
noonday. But half way up the drive I met Martin walking briskly down to
meet me. He was bareheaded and in flannels; and I could not help it if
he looked to me so good, so strong, and so well able to protect a woman
against every danger, that the instructions I had received in church,
and the resolutions I had formed there, seemed to run out of my heart as
rapidly as the dry sand of the sea-shore runs through one's fingers.

"Helloa!" he cried, as usual. "The way I've been wasting this wonderful
morning over letters and telegrams! But not another minute will I give
to anything under the stars of God but you."

If there was any woman in the world who could have resisted that
greeting I was not she, and though I was a little confused I was very
happy.

As we walked back to the house we talked of my father and his sudden
illness, then of his mother and my glimpse of her, and finally of
indifferent things, such as the weather, which had been a long drought
and might end in a deluge.

By a sort of mutual consent we never once spoke of the central subject
of our thoughts--my marriage and its fatal consequences--but I noticed
that Martin's voice was soft and caressing, that he was walking close to
my side, and that as often as I looked up at him he was looking down at
me and smiling.

It was the same after luncheon when we went out into the garden and sat
on a seat in the shrubbery almost immediately facing my windows, and he
spread a chart on a rustic table and pointing to a red line on it said:

"Look, this is the course of our new cruise, please God."

He talked for a long time, about his captain and crew; the scientific
experts who had volunteered to accompany him, his aeronautic outfit, his
sledges and his skis; but whatever he talked about--if it was only his
dogs and the food he had found for them--it was always in that soft,
caressing voice which made me feel as if (though he never said one word
of love) he were making love to me, and saying the sweetest things a man
could say to a woman.