CHAPTER XVI.

At a rather early hour the next morning, Mr. Charteris is astir, and out upon the sands.

Not so early as some others, though, he finds, for in a merry group of young people on the sands, he meets Sir George Wilde in close proximity to Reine. Vane, giving them a careless good-morning, passes on to some little distance, where he pauses with folded arms, and a slightly sulky aspect, to look out over the wide waste of heaving sea, his shapely back turned resolutely on the merry-makers.

"Confound the fellow's impudence," he remarks to himself, with needless savagery. "How he follows her around. Of course she would rather be with me. She loves me, or pretends to."

Why he should feel vexed at Sir George's monopoly of his, Vane's, unloved bride he could not explain to himself. Yet the feeling is there.

Glancing furtively over his shoulder, and seeing the undeniably handsome and well-matched pair strolling on side by side, creates a feeling of decided ill-humor within him.

"It is quite a flirtation," he tells himself. "Reine should know better, being a married woman. But perhaps she has taken a fancy to the fellow. Perhaps she was mistaken in the notion that she cared for me. She had seen no one else then. But now, meeting this handsome, spoony young baronet, she may regret this nasty marriage as much as I do."

While these thoughts flash through his mind, the gay hum of voices die away. The party have gone out of sight, and a sudden resolution comes into Vane's mind.

"I'll go and breakfast with the old gentleman again," he thinks. "After all it's only the proper thing to call and inquire for his health. Of course Reine will not have come in from her walk yet."

In this he deceives himself. Reine is there by the side of the old man's couch, with a lapful of rosy-tinted shells which she is displaying with a good deal of childish pleasure in their acquisition.

"Sir George found this one; isn't it a beauty?" she is saying, vivaciously, as the door opens, and Mr. Charteris is ushered in.

A start, a blush, a dimpling smile. She rises, gathering her treasures, child-like, in her apron overskirt.

Mr. Charteris, vouchsafing her a careless nod, passes on to Mr. Langton.

"I hope I find you better this morning, and rested?" he observes, taking the chair Reine places, without seeming to see her.

"A trifle easier, yes," Mr. Langton responds, with more than ordinary graciousness, and then Vane steals a furtive glance at Reine.

Some of the brightness that came into her face at his entrance has faded from it. She has quietly seated herself again, her long lashes droop to the shells in her lap, which she fingers rather at random.

"So the baronet helped you gather shells," he remarks, condescendingly.

She looks up, with returning smiles.

"Yes," she returns, spreading the pretty collection out to view. "Will you look at them? Some are quite pretty."

"Reine has been telling me about your friend," put in Mr. Langton. "He was very kind."

"Not my friend, a mere acquaintance," Vane replies with acerbity. "I saw him a few times in London; he is wild, rather."

"Indeed! and _I_ thought him so nice," Reine says, with dismay.

"So he _is_ nice; wildness, a little, you know, doesn't count," Vane hastens to say, ashamed of the spirit in which he has spoken a moment before. "Sir George is unexceptionable, rich, titled, and all that. He is what the ladies term a most desirable _parti_. A pity you are a-a-already married, Reine."

"Were I free he could be nothing to me," Reine retorts, a crimson flame coming to her cheeks.

Mr. Langton, struck by something in Vane's tone, looks from one to the other of the flushed faces, and says, laughingly:

"O-ho, my fine young lad, jealous, are you?"

Mr. Charteris is positively indignant.

"Don't tease, if you please, Mr. Langton," he retorts, with immense dignity. "Jealousy only exists with love, you know. And I haven't pretended to fall in love with my wife yet!"

With this most ungenerous stab, he flies out of the room in a passion.

The rosy-lipped shells fall unheeded from Reine's lap to the floor as she rises and stands before her uncle, the bitter tears of shame crowding into her eyes.

"Oh, Uncle Langton, how _could_ you--how _could_ you?" she cries, in bitter distress. "It--it is too--too absurd. He never could, you know----"

"There--there, don't cry, dear," he soothes, gently. "I am an old bungler, I know, and I shouldn't have said it so plain, but the fact remains. Vane Charteris, whether he knows it or not, is falling in love with you, my dear, and is correspondingly jealous of the baronet's attentions to you."

The beautiful dark eyes looked at him incredulously. She shakes her head.

"You are mistaken," she answers, decidedly. "Your hopes mislead you. Confess now," smiling pensively through her tears, "that 'the wish was father to the thought.'"

"Perhaps so," he answers, willing to drop the subject and sorry he had agitated it.

* * * * *

Vane goes home rather ruefully, without breakfasting with Mr. Langton, as he had promised himself.

"What possessed me to be so rude, I wonder?" he soliloquizes. "Though I did not love her, it was awkward and ill-considered to cast it in her teeth. I begin to believe that it is I who am brusk and unmannerly, not she."

The day goes, long and wearily it seems to Vane, who is conscious of some new feeling he cannot realize, perhaps does not try to.

He smokes and reads, turning an unsociable cold shoulder on the rather dry _habitues_ of the hotel. In the evening, drawn by "a spirit in his feet," and thoroughly _ennuyed_ with his own society, he saunters over to the Sea View Hotel.

On his way he meditates rather slowly.

"It is doubtful whether she will receive me," his musings run. "I was rude this morning. Of course the little spitfire will resent it. She has too much spirit to tamely brook such shameless impudence. I certainly forgot myself in my vexation at that stupid old man."

The wide balcony of the Sea View presents a pleasant sight. A dozen or two of "young men and maidens" are assembled on it, some sitting, some walking, but one and all flirting with the greatest interest and delight.

Vane's quick eye singles out one solitary figure sitting apart from the rest, a slight, girlish one in white, the dark head bent over a book.

To this figure Vane goes forward, not without a lurking dread of meeting a petulant repulse.

He stops behind her chair, and Reine, startled, looks around.

Vane is relieved to find that there is no resentment in her face, only a new, sweet gravity a little strange to see on the piquant, girlish face.

"Ah, it is you, Mr. Charteris!" she says, carelessly. "You left us so unceremoniously this morning, I fear--thought you would not return."

Vane slips into the chair beside her, his heart unconsciously lightened of the burden that has weighed it down all day.

"To tell the truth I was half-afraid to come," he answers; "I was very rude to you this morning, and I knew you had reason to resent it, and expected you would. You remember you were wont to give me a piece of your mind very often in the days 'when we were first acquainted.'"

"Yes, but things are changed, you know," she returns, gently.

Reine is changed too. The thought flashes over him suddenly as he looks at her keenly, taking advantage of her momentary obliviousness of his presence.

She has folded her very small and slender white hands across the book in her lap, and is gazing a little dreamily out to sea.

The dark eyes are not so free and glad as they were of old.

They have grown larger and vaguely sad, the peachy cheek, rounded daintily like a child's, is pale to-day, the crimson lips have a slight, pathetic droop. Something in the softened loveliness of the brilliant face goes to his heart like a wordless reproach.

For a moment he regrets the arch, daring, sparkling face that used to flash defiance at him and his opinions.

"You are changed, too, Reine," he says, unconsciously putting his thought into words. "You used to scold me when I was naughty. I hope you are not afraid of me now because you are my wife?"

A great wave of color surges into her cheek at his words. She turns on him the half-shy gaze of the frank, dark eyes.

"Afraid of you--oh, no, it is not that," she says. "But you disliked my wild ways so much that I have tried to be more what you wished me, more dignified, more gentle."

He looks at her with a half question in his blue eyes, a flush on his handsome face.

"Like Maud," she explains, further.

"Like Maud--why, really," he begins, with supreme anger and sarcasm, but she interrupts him, somewhat incoherently:

"I thought--I was told, I mean that--that I was to stay with Uncle Langton a year, and be formed over into a woman like Maud."

His blue eyes darken with shame and anger.

"So you have heard _that_!" he says, with self-contempt. "I was a fool, a dolt. Give over the attempt, Reine. You can never be like Maud any more than--than a rose is like a lily!"

"So I thought," she answers, visibly abashed. "Maud is so grand, and white, and queenly, and I am so little, and dark, and ugly."

"That is not true," he answers, hastily. "You are beautiful, Reine. I am sure you know _that_. You are like a beautiful 'queen-rose,' all sweetness, color and dew, 'set round with little willful thorns.' Maud is like a grand white calla lily, beautiful, but devoid of sweetness and perfume."

"The lily is the most beautiful of all flowers," the girl answers, sighing.

"But the rose is the emblem of love," he replies, smiling as the swift color floods her cheeks.

She has no answer ready, and he goes on with some embarrassment:

"Do not try to be like Maud, Reine. Though so beautiful and stately, she was mercenary and treacherous. Perhaps a less perfect manner is preferable with a heart free from guile. Do you not think so?"

Before she can reply, Sir George Wilde comes up to them. His eyes rest admiringly on the beautiful, graceful, dark-eyed girl by the side of Vane Charteris.

"Sentimentalizing and reading poetry?" says the intruder, looking at Reine's book. "Upon my word it is simply shocking, the number of flirtations going on this evening. Miss Langton, let me see your verses," coolly taking the open volume from her hand.

Vane, looking off to sea, unreasonably vexed, and out of humor, hears him reading in a clear, full voice, the lines on which Reine's hands have been closely folded since he sat down by her.

"'We stand at the window watching, Oh, God! through the glass of time, For the sails of our hopes to blossom Out on life's horizon line.

"'And we see not across the islands The clouds that come up the sun, Until they have folded in silence The headlands one by one.

"'And the winds to each other calling Over the waters pass, And we say: "They are wrecked at dawning, The hopes of our lives, alas!"'"

"Lugubrious reading, certainly," comments the lively young baronet. "Does Charteris enjoy that style of poetry for a summer evening by the sea?"

"I--I was not reading to Mr. Charteris," the girl stammers, vaguely confused. "I was reading when he came, and then I laid the book down."

Both men regard her a little gravely.

The touch of sadness in face and voice is strange, yet sweet, in the young and lovely girl.

Sir George tells himself that there is some depth to this lovely American girl, and wonders why Charteris doesn't fall in love with her.

For himself, he is very far gone indeed, and Vane, irritated by his society, abruptly announces that he will go up and see Mr. Langton.

"He will be very pleased, I know," Reine answers, brightening suddenly, and Vane turns away with a sudden angry conviction that she is glad to have him gone.

Sir George is glad at least, there can be no two opinions as to that. He settles himself delightedly in Vane's vacated chair.