She did not
laugh at him, however. She was staring at him with that keen, measuring
look which had so incensed him, when he had first met her. "I don't
understand you at all, Ford," she said at last, with a frown of
puzzlement. "I never have, for that matter. I'd think I was beginning
to, and then you would say or do something that would put me all at sea.
What do you mean, anyway?"
Ford told her what he meant; told her humbly, truthfully, with never an
excuse for himself. And it speaks well for the good sense of Josephine
that she heard him through with neither tears, laughter, nor anger to
mar his trust in her.
"Of course, I knew you had been drinking, that night," she said, when
his story was done, and his face was pressed lightly against the white
parting in her soft, brown hair. "I saw it, after--after the ceremony.
You--you were going to kiss me, and I caught the odor of liquor, and I
felt that you wouldn't have done that if you had been yourself; it
frightened me, a little. But you talked perfectly straight, and I never
knew you weren't the man--Frank Cameron--until you came here. Then I saw
you couldn't be he.
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