I don't know who he was, but I
guess he was in love with her himself. And then the papers had it that
I was down with the fever here, and she read about it. I _was_
ill for a time, and I hoped it was going to carry me off decently, but
I got up in a week or two, and one day I crawled down here where we're
standing now to watch the boat come in. I was pretty weak from my
illness, and I was bluer than I had ever been, and I didn't see
anything but blackness and bitterness for me anywhere. I turned around
when the passengers reached the pier, and I saw a woman coming up
those stairs. Her figure and her shoulders were so like Alice's that
my heart went right up into my throat, and I couldn't breathe for it.
I just stood still staring, and when she reached the top of the steps
she looked up, breathing with the climb, and laughing; and she says,
'Lloyd, I've come to see you.' And I--I was that lonely and weak that
I grabbed her hand, and leaned back against the railing, and cried
there before the whole of them. I don't think she expected it exactly,
because she didn't know what to do, and just patted me on the
shoulder, and said, 'I thought I'd run down to cheer you up a bit; and
I've brought Mrs. Scott with me to chaperon us.' And I said, without
stopping to think: 'You wouldn't have needed any chaperon, Alice, if I
hadn't been a cur and a fool. If I had only asked what I can't ask of
you now'; and, Holcombe, she flushed just like a little girl, and
laughed, and said, 'Oh, will you, Lloyd?' And you see that ugly iron
chapel up there, with the corrugated zinc roof and the wooden cross on
it, next to the mosque? Well, that's where we went first, right from
this wharf before I let her go to a hotel, and old Ridley, the English
rector, he married us, and we had a civil marriage too.
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