Derek sat down beside her. The cordiality of her tone had relieved, yet at the same time disconcerted him. Man seldom attains to perfect contentment in this world, and Derek, while pleased that Jill apparently bore him no ill-will, seemed to miss something in her manner which he would have been glad to find there.
"Jill!" he said huskily.
It seemed to Derek only decent to speak huskily. To his orderly mind this situation could be handled only in one way. It was a plain, straight issue of the strong man humbling himself—not too much of course, but sufficiently: and it called, in his opinion, for the low voice, the clenched hand, and the broken whisper. Speaking as he had spoken, he had given the scene the right key from the start—or would have done if she had not got in ahead of him and opened it on a note of absurd cheeriness? Derek found himself resenting her cheeriness. Often as he had attempted during the voyage from England to visualize to himself this first meeting, he had never pictured Jill smiling brightly at him. It was a jolly smile, and made her look extremely pretty, but it jarred upon him. A moment before he had been half relieved, half disconcerted: now he was definitely disconcerted. He searched in his mind for a criticism of her attitude, and came to the conclusion that what was wrong with it was that it was too friendly. Friendliness is well enough in its way, but in what should have been a tense clashing of strong emotions it did not seem to Derek fitting.
"Did you have a pleasant trip?" asked Jill. "Have you come over on business?"
A feeling of bewilderment came upon Derek. It was wrong, it was all wrong. Of course, she might be speaking like this to cloak intense feeling, but, if so, she had certainly succeeded. From her manner, he and she might be casual acquaintances. A pleasant trip! In another minute she would be asking him how he had come out on the sweepstake on the ship's run. With a sense of putting his shoulder to some heavy weight and heaving at it, he sought to lift the conversation to a higher plane.
"I came to find you!" he said; still huskily but not so huskily as before. There are degrees of huskiness, and Derek's was sharpened a little by a touch of irritation.
"Yes?" said Jill.
Derek was now fermenting. What she ought to have said, he did not know, but he knew that it was not "Yes?" "Yes?" in the circumstances was almost as bad as "Really?"
There was a pause. Jill was looking at him with a frank and unembarrassed gaze which somehow deepened his sense of annoyance. Had she looked at him coldly, he could have understood and even appreciated it. He had been expecting coldness, and had braced himself to combat it. He was still not quite sure in his mind whether he was playing the rôle of a penitent or a King Cophetua, but in either character he might have anticipated a little temporary coldness, which it would have been his easy task to melt. But he had never expected to be looked at as if he were a specimen in a museum, and that was how he was feeling now. Jill was not looking at him—she was inspecting him, examining him, and he chafed under the process.
Jill, unconscious of the discomfort she was causing, continued to gaze. She was trying to discover in just what respect he had changed from the god he had been. Certainly not in looks. He was as handsome as ever—handsomer, indeed, for the sunshine and clean breezes of the Atlantic had given him an exceedingly becoming coat of tan. And yet he must have changed, for now she could look upon him quite dispassionately and criticize him without a tremor. It was like seeing a copy of a great painting. Everything was there, except the one thing that mattered, the magic and the glamour. It was like.... She suddenly remembered a scene in the dressing-room when the company had been in Baltimore. Lois Denham, duly the recipient of the sunburst which her friend Izzy had promised her, had unfortunately, in a spirit of girlish curiosity, taken it to a jeweller to be priced, and the jeweller had blasted her young life by declaring it a paste imitation. Jill recalled how the stricken girl—previous to calling Izzy on the long distance and telling him a number of things which, while probably not news to him, must have been painful hearing—had passed the vile object round the dressing-room for inspection. The imitation was perfect. It had been impossible for the girls to tell that the stones were not real diamonds. Yet the jeweller, with his sixth sense, had seen through them in a trifle under ten seconds. Jill came to the conclusion that her newly-discovered love for Wally Mason had equipped her with a sixth sense, and that by its aid she was really for the first time seeing Derek as he was.
Derek had not the privilege of being able to read Jill's thoughts. All he could see was the outer Jill, and the outer Jill, as she had always done, was stirring his emotions. Her daintiness afflicted him. Not for the first, the second, or the third time since they had come into each other's lives, he was astounded at the strength of the appeal which Jill had for him when they were together, as contrasted with its weakness when they were apart. He made another attempt to establish the scene on a loftier plane.
"What a fool I was!" he sighed. "Jill! Can you ever forgive me?"
He tried to take her hand. Jill skilfully eluded him.
"Why, of course I've forgiven you, Derek, if there was, anything to forgive."
"Anything to forgive!" Derek began to get into his stride. These were the lines on which he had desired the interview to develop. "I was a brute! A cad!"
"Oh, no!"
"I was. Oh, I have been through hell!"
Jill turned her head away. She did not want to hurt him, but nothing could have kept her from smiling. She had been so sure that he would say that sooner or later.
"Jill!" Derek had misinterpreted the cause of her movement, and had attributed it to emotion. "Tell me that everything is as it was before."
Jill turned.
"I'm afraid I can't say that, Derek."
"Of course not!" agreed Derek in a comfortable glow of manly remorse. He liked himself in the character of the strong man abashed. "It would be too much to expect, I know. But, when we are married...."
"Do you really want to marry me?"
"Jill!"
"I wonder!"
"How can you doubt it?"
Jill looked at him.
"Have you thought what it would mean?"
"What it would mean?"
"Well, your mother...."
"Oh!" Derek dismissed Lady Underhill with a grand gesture.
"Yes," persisted Jill, "but, if she disapproved of your marrying me before, wouldn't she disapprove a good deal more now, when I haven't a penny in the world and am just in the chorus...."
A sort of strangled sound proceeded from Derek's throat.
"In the chorus!"
"Didn't you know? I thought Freddie must have told you."
"In the chorus!" Derek stammered. "I thought you were here as a guest of Mrs. Peagrim's."
"So I am—like all the rest of the company."
"But.... But...."
"You see, it would be bound to make everything a little difficult," said Jill. Her face was grave, but her lips were twitching. "I mean, you are rather a prominent man, aren't you, and if you married a chorus-girl...."
"Nobody would know," said Derek limply.
Jill opened her eyes.
"Nobody would know!" She laughed. "But, of course, you've never met our Press-agent. If you think that nobody would know that a girl in the company had married a baronet who was a member of parliament and expected to be in the Cabinet in a few years, you're wronging him! The news would be on the front page of all the papers the very next day—columns of it, with photographs. There would be articles about it in the Sunday papers. Illustrated! And then it would be cabled to England and would appear in the papers there.... You see, you're a very important person, Derek."
Derek sat clutching the arms of his chair. His face was chalky. Though he had never been inclined to underestimate his importance as a figure in the public eye, he had overlooked the disadvantages connected with such an eminence. He gurgled wordlessly. He had been prepared to brave Lady Underhill's wrath and assert his right to marry whom he pleased, but this was different.