Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/339

Rh him like those pools. They were full of hidden treasures. But he gave no voice to such sentiments.

"There isn't much to understand," he said. "The poor fool you married doesn't exist any more. That's all. That's what I've come to tell you, and you're as free as if he had a tombstone at his head."

She got but a vague idea of the meaning of his words. All she could hear was the new miraculous inflection.

"I don't understand," she exclaimed again in a distressed tone, as if it hurt her physically not to understand. "I don't like surprises. I don't like jokes!"

Nathan surveyed her in amazement. She was almost savage about it. The brown pools shone mahogany red.

"Jokes?" he repeated. "Jokes?"

"I don't like things I don't understand." Her voice was beginning to tremble now, like that absurd left knee. "I don't like them, I don't like them," she said twice over.

The truth was she was afraid if she didn't keep on saying something, making her lips form words, that her teeth would begin to chatter, like the time when the little boy was run over by an automobile once before her very eyes, and picked up afterward limp and apparently lifeless. It was the shock, she supposed. She had come ready, steeled for the uncouth sailor, and instead a fine stranger in uniform—an officer, she believed, (didn't two bars mean a captain?)—spoke with Nathan's voice, smiled with Nathan's smile, but wasn't like Nathan at all. She took out a handkerchief from her bag, and pressed it up against her lips hard, holding her teeth steady.