Into her mind, never far distant from it, came the thought of Derek. And, suddenly, Jill made another discovery. She was thinking of Derek, and it was not hurting. She was thinking of him quite coolly and clearly and her heart was not aching.
She sat back and screwed her eyes tight, as she had always done when puzzled. Something had happened to her, but how it had happened and when it had happened and why it had happened she could not understand. She only knew that now for the first time she had been granted a moment of clear vision and was seeing things truly.
She wanted Wally. She wanted him in the sense that she could not do without him. She felt nothing of the fiery tumult which had come upon her when she first met Derek. She and Wally would come together with a smile and build their life on an enduring foundation of laughter and happiness and good-fellowship. Wally had never shaken and never would shake her senses as Derek had done. If that was love, then she did not love Wally. But her clear vision told her that it was not love. It might be the blazing and crackling of thorns, but it was not the fire. She wanted Wally. She needed him as she needed the air and the sunlight.
She opened her eyes, and saw Uncle Chris coming down the aisle towards her. There was a man with him, and, as they moved closer in the dim light, Jill saw that it was Derek.
“Jill, my dear,” said Uncle Chris, “here is an old friend to see you!”
And, having achieved their bringing together, he proceeded to withdraw delicately whence he had come. It is pleasant to be able to record that he was immediately seized upon by Mrs Peagrim, who had changed her mind about not dancing, and led off to be her partner in a fox-trot, in the course of which she trod on his feet three times.
“Why, Derek!” said Jill cheerfully. She got up and moved down the line of seats. Except for a mild wonder how he came to be there, she found herself wholly unaffected by the sight of him. “Whatever are you doing here?”
Derek sat down beside her. The cordiality of her tone had relieved yet at the same time disconcerted him. Man seldom attains to perfect contentment in this world, and Derek, while pleased that Jill apparently bore him no ill-will, seemed to miss something in her manner which he would have been glad to find there.
“Jill!” he said huskily.
It deemed to Derek only decent to speak huskily. To his orderly mind this situation could be handled only in one way. It was a plain, straight issue of the strong man humbling himself—not too much, of course, but sufficiently: and it called, in his opinion, for the low voice, the clenched hand, and the broken whisper. Speaking as he had spoken, he had given the scene the right key from the start,—or would have done if she had not got in ahead of him and opened it on a note of absurd cheeriness. Derek found himself resenting her cheeriness. Often as he had attempted during the voyage from England to visualize to himself this first meeting, he had never pictured Jill smiling brightly at him. It was a jolly smile, and made her look extremely pretty, but it jarred upon him. A moment before he had been half relieved, half disconcerted: now he was definitely disconcerted. He searched in his mind for a criticism of her attitude, and came to the conclusion that what was wrong with it was that it was too friendly. Friendliness is well enough in its way, but in what should have been a tense clashing of strong emotions it did not seem to Derek fitting.
“Did you have a pleasant trip?” asked Jill. “Have you come over on business?”
A feeling of bewilderment came upon Derek. It was wrong, it was all wrong. Of course, she might be speaking like this to cloak intense feeling, but, if so, she had certainly succeeded. From her manner, he and she might be casual acquaintances. A pleasant trip! In another minute she would be asking him how he had come out on the sweepstake on the ship’s run. With a sense of putting his shoulder to some heavy weight and heaving at it, he sought to lift the conversation to a higher plane.