Murano,--Carlotta Murano. Good-by." She moved away, then stopped
suddenly and said, "I'm comin' again some time when the thing is
working," and with a nod of her head, ran away. He looked after her;
could see the outlines of her youthful figure in her slim cotton
gown,--limp and clinging in the damp sea air, and the sudden revelation
of her bare ankles thrust stockingless into canvas shoes.
He went back into his cabin, when presently his attention was engrossed
by an incoming vessel. He made the signals, half expecting, almost
hoping, that the girl would return to watch him. But her figure was
already lost in the sand dunes. Yet he fancied he still heard the echoes
of her voice and his own in this cabin which had so long been dumb and
voiceless, and he now started at every sound. For the first time he
became aware of the dreadful disorder and untidiness of its uninvaded
privacy. He could scarcely believe he had been living with his stove,
his bed, and cooking utensils all in one corner of the barnlike room,
and he began to put them "to rights" in a rough, hard formality,
strongly suggestive of his convict experience. He rolled up his blankets
into a hard cylinder at the head of his cot. He scraped out his kettles
and saucepans, and even "washed down" the floor, afterwards sprinkling
clean dry sand, hot with the noonday sunshine, on its half-dried boards.
In arranging these domestic details he had to change the position of a
little mirror; and glancing at it for the first time in many days, he
was dissatisfied with his straggling beard,--grown during his voyage
from Australia,--and although he had retained it as a disguise, he at
once shaved it off, leaving only a mustache, and revealing a face from
which a healthier life and out-of-door existence had removed the last
traces of vice and dissipation. But he did not know it.
All the next day he thought of his fair visitor, and found himself often
repeating her odd remark that she was "not that kind of girl," with a
smile that was alternately significant or vacant. Evidently she could
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