A sudden gust of wind whipped one of King’s papers off the table where
he sat figuring opium problems. It went skimming across the floor, and
Stella thrust out a foot to intercept its flight: a spontaneous act which
set her husband musing in a rather odd way.
“You’ve a remarkably narrow foot, haven’t you Stella?” he said. “I
noticed it even that first time we met in the street.”
“Have I?” she laughed, fluttering a little—a mannerism her husband still
possessed the magic potency to inspire.
He seemed to be studying her foot with an abrupt and quite absorbed
interest.
“It’s not very often—” He broke off and glanced up with a rather furtive
smile. “I mean—you must wear about a double A, don’t you?”
“How did you guess?” she laughed. She adored Ferdinand in this sort of
personal, gently intimate mood. It somehow, very subtly, compensated for
the splendours not yet come to pass....
King eyed her shoe attentively. There was even something trancelike in
his gaze. When he spoke again it was with a touch of far-away dreaminess.
“Double A,” he half chanted, “with a short instep—yes—and one of those
Standish heels they’re using such a lot now....” He glanced up again,
this time with a faint start, and found Stella gazing at him amused,
perplexed a little.
“That’s just what the man at the shoe store said,” she smiled. “You’re
terribly clever!” And when her husband, a look still detached and a shade
self-conscious in his round blue eyes, had taken possession of the sheet
of paper she had rescued, and had returned to his work at the table,
Stella sat meditating. But ever, quaintly, through her reverie, like a
whimsical refrain, ran the thread of King’s words: “Double A—with one of
those Standish heels....”
Suddenly, as she looked at him, it seemed to Stella that he was an utter
stranger—she had never seen him till now—they had not _really_ married
and come out here to this mysterious unknown island. Just as abruptly
the sensation passed; but the girl still felt in her heart a shiver of
nervous excitement, and, in brooding mood, got up and roamed restlessly
about the house.
The wind romped outside with nervous starts and stops, each gust
strangely impelling her to fresh question and uninvited quandary.
At length, impelled by a wave of romantic tenderness, Stella paused in
her roaming and leaned up against her husband, so deeply absorbed in
his task—acreage, crops, the problem of irrigation. “Ferd, dear,” she
murmured after a little. “Ferd, dear—I keep feeling as though I’d have to
wake up. I know it’s foolish of me, but the strangeness doesn’t seem to
wear off. Does it ever come over you that way?”
“What?” he muttered, obviously only half conscious she had spoken at all.
Stella caressed her husband’s hair, and, working one little finger into
his lapel buttonhole, coaxed: “Ferd—why _did_ we come to Hagen’s Island?”
He looked up at her then, a somewhat troubled expression in his face.
“Well,” he said slowly, his lips, so like a tender cupid’s bow, touched
with a smile of faint irony, “I guess it was what one would have to call
a case of grabbing up the first thing in sight!”
“But—” Her look was a little troubled.
“Oh, I give you my word,” he laughed, “I’d have preferred a good many
places to this, despite its very superior cocoanuts and sunsets—some
place a trifle less remote. I’m sure I never listened to such a lot of
silence all at once in my life! But here was the chance, and it had to
be this or—well, something a great deal more prosaic. Unfortunately,”
he added, “a man has to work for his living in this hard and unfeeling
world!”