The Cheat (Holman)/Chapter 26
A steamship, ghostly white in the cool September moonlight, was making its way silently across the Caribbean.
A man and a woman were standing very close together, leaning on the rail of the passenger deck. She had brought him out to show him the Southern Cross tilting in the sky ahead of them. But now the woman, a gloriously beautiful girl of twenty-four or five, changed the subject.
"There must be some very special Fate looking after me," she said gravely. "I have thought so many times since that day in the courtroom. Why has Fate been so good to me? I have been selfish, thoughtless, anything almost that a good woman should not be, and yet I have attained every one of my heart's desires. I have you and my father back again, and, though it doesn't seem at all important now, I have the money I once thought I could never do without."
He looked down at her, smiling.
"There is one very marvelous thing about most women, Carmelita," he said. "As soon as the sun starts to shine, you have a wonderful gift for forgetting the terrible shadows you have been through. That is the chief reason the human race goes on. Men are usually not such good sports."
"Some men are."
"Perhaps. At any rate there would have been no benevolent Fate looking after you if you hadn't been worth it; if you weren't the good, heroic woman you are."
She was actually blushing. "Don't flatter me, Dudley," she bantered. "You have no idea how it goes to the head of us Spanish ladies."
"We shall see. In the meantime, you have promised the last dance to your father, and after that there is some excellent sleeping to be done, and an excellent stateroom to do it in, with a gently rolling ship to furnish a lullaby."
"As my husband says, 'Right-o.'"
The chronic dyspeptic who, huddled in his steamer rugs in the shadows because his doctor had warned him that the only way to avoid seasickness was to stay in the air, regarded Carmelita and Dudley with a jaundiced eye as they walked past him buoyantly arm in arm.
"Some people," he muttered to himself, "have all the luck. Those two have obviously never had a care in the world. They don't know what it is to suffer."
A billion miles away a star winked down.
The End