Page:Dangerous Business (1927).pdf/207

 "There's nothing at Santa Lucia, Jay," she told him. "Nothing for me. I guess there's nothing in Levuka. Santa Lucia must be enough like Levuka to let you know. The Fiji couldn't be lazier than the niggers or the sand hotter. There're palms in the sand and the sun, and you see the Southern Cross. . . . It's frightfully over-rated, dim and not even straight. Seen it?"

"Never," said Jay, gently patting her.

"It's crooked, like that!" She stabbed with a finger to mark the position of the four disappointing stars. "Nothing to cheer for. There's nothing at Levuka, I guess. Where is it, Jay; where is it for me?"

He held her gently, with the new tenderness which had come to him with her and which she would not have from him. She stirred in protest to it.

"I thought for a while down there, if you'd been there, Jay, we might have found . . . it; but we wouldn't."

Still he made no reply and she turned, confronting him, holding his face between her hands.

"What you been finding, Jay?" she asked.

"I?" he said. "I've just been at work. Not much done," he confessed, "but I've been at it." And his mind was with her who had been at it with him.

Lida's fingers drew, familiarly, upon his cheeks, too tensely, too troubledly, too demandingly. He thought of Ellen's touch in the brief contact of their hands and he thought how would be her touch upon his face, how different from Lida's. He withdrew, slightly, from Lida's.

"Who is she, Jay?"

"Who?"

"There was no one when I went away, Jay," she said.