He kept devouring her with his eyes, still incredulous.
"Are you disappointed ?" she asked timidly.
"How can you ask that?" he exclaimed.
"Am I forgiven ?" was the next faltering question.
"It was a lovely deception," he said with warmth of feeling. "I don't think there's been a lovelier one ever committed."
He smiled, and her smile, still somewhat abashed, answered his own.
"But now I will have to get used to you all over again. Grow to know you all over again. That was a false start," he said cheerfully.
She turned her head aside and mutely half-hid it against her own shoulder. And yet even this gesture, which might have seemed maudlin or revoltingly saccharine in others, she managed to carry off successfully, making it appear no more than a playful parody while at the same time deftly conveying its original intent of rebuked coyness.
He grinned.
She turned her face toward him again. "Are your plans, your, er, intentions, altered?"
"Are yours?"
"I'm here,"she said with the utmost simplicity, grave now.
He studied her a moment longer, absorbing her charm. Then suddenly, with new-found daring, he came to a decision. "Would it make you feel better, would it ease your mind of any lingering discomfort," he blurted out, "if I were to make a confession to you on my own part?"
"You ?" she said surprised.
"I--I no more told you the entire truth than you told me," he rushed on.
"But--but I see you quite as you said you were, quite as your picture described you--"
"It isn't that, it's something else. I too perhaps felt just as you did, that I wanted you to like me, to accept my offer, solely on the strength of the sort of man I was in myself. For myself alone, in other words."
"But I see that, and I do," she said blankly. "I don't understand."
"You will in a moment," he promised her, almost eagerly. "Now I must confess to you that I'm not a clerk in a coffee-import house."
Her face betrayed no sign other than politely interested incomprehension.
"That I haven't a thousand dollars put aside, to--to start us off."
No sign. No sign of crestf all or of frustrated avarice. He was watching her intently. A slow smile of indulgence, of absolution granted, overspread her features before he had spoken next. Well before he had spoken next. He gave it time.
"No, I own a coffee-import house, instead."
No sign. Only that slightly forced smile, such as women give in listening to details of a man's business, when it doesn't interest them in the slightest but they are trying to be polite.
"No, I have closer to a hundred thousand dollars."
He waited for her to say something. She didn't. She, on the contrary, seemed to be waiting for him to continue. As if the subject had been so arid, and barren of import, to her, that she did not realize the climax had already been reached.
"Well, that's my confession," he said somewhat lamely.
"Oh," she said, as if brought up short. "Oh, was that it? You mean--" She fluttered her hand with vague helplessness. "--about your business, and money matters--" She brought two fingers to her mouth, and crossed it with their tips. Stifling a yawn that, without the gesture of concealment, he would not have detected in the first place. "There are two things I have no head for," she admitted. "One is politics, the other is business, money matters."
"But you do forgive me?" he persisted. Conscious at the same time of a fierce inward joy, that was almost exultation; as when one has encountered a perfection of attitude, at long last, and almost by chance, that was scarcely to be hoped for.
She laughed outright this time, with a glint of mischief, as if he were giving her more credit than was due her. "If you must be forgiven, you're forgiven," she relented. "But since I paid no attention whatever to the passages in your letters that dealt with that, in the first place, why, you're asking forgiveness for a fault I was not aware, until now, of your having committed. Take it, then, though I'm not sure what it's for."
He stared at her with a new intentness, that went deeper than before; as if finding her as utterly charming within as she was at first sight without.
Their shadows were growing longer, and they were all but alone now on the pier. He glanced around him as if reluctantly awakening to their surroundings. "It's getting late, and I'm keeping you standing here," he said in a reminder that was more dutiful than honest, for it might mean their separation, for all he knew.
"You make me forget the time," she admitted, her eyes never leaving his face. "Is that a bad omen or a good? You even make me forget my predicament: half ashore and half still on the boat. I must soon become the one or the other."
"That's soon taken care of," he said, leaning forward eagerly, "if I have your own consent."
"Isn't yours necessary too ?" she said archly.
"It's given, it's given." 'He was almost breathless with haste to convince her.
She was in no hurry, now that he was. "I don't know," she said, lifting the point of her parasol, then dropping it again, then lifting it once more, in an uncertainty that he found excruciating. "If you had not seemed satisfied, if you had looked askance at the deceiver that you found me to be, I intended going back onto the boat and remaining aboard till she set out on the return trip to St. Louis. Don't you think that might still be the wiser--"
"No, don't say that," he urged, alarmed. "Satisfied? I'm the happiest man in New Orleans this evening--I'm the luckiest man in this town--"
She was not, it seemed, to be swayed so easily. "There is still time. Better now than later. Are you quite sure you wouldn't rather have me do that? I won't say a word, I won't complain. I'll understand your feelings perfectly--"
He was gripped by a sudden new fear of losing her. She, whom he hadn't had at all until scarcely half an hour ago.
"But those aren't my feelings! I beg you to believe me! My feelings are quite the opposite. What can I do to convince you? Do you want more time? Is it you? Is that what you are trying to say to me ?" he insisted with growing anxiety.
She held him for a moment with her eyes, and they were kindly and candid and even, one might have said, somewhat tender. Then she shook her head, very slightly it is true, 'but with all the firmness of intention that a man might have given the gesture (if he could read it right), and not a girl's facile undependable negation.
"My mind has been made up," she told him, slowly and simply, "since I first stepped onto the boat at St. Louis. Since your letter of proposal came, as a matter of fact, and I wrote you my answer. And I do not lightly undo my mind, once it has been made up. You will find that once you know me better." Then she qualified it: "If you do," and let that find him out with a little unwelcome stab, as it promptly did.
"I'll let this be my answer, then," he said with tremulous impatience. "Here it is." He opened his cardcase, took out the daguerrotype, the one of the other, older woman--her aunt's-minced it with energetic fingers, then let it fall in trifling pieces downward all over the ground. Then showed her both his hands, empty.
"My mind is made up too."
She smiled her acceptance. "Then--?"
"Then let's be on our way. They're waiting for us at the church the past quarter-hour or more. We've delayed here too long."
He tilted his arm akimbo, offered it to her with a smile and a gallant inclination from the waist, that were perhaps, on the surface, meant to appear as badinage, merely a bantering parody, but were in reality more sincerely intended.