‘Swine,’ said Charles without heat.
‘Charles, he’s dead now.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed thoughtfully. ‘As you said like a judgment.’
She smiled faintly and murmured:
‘You’re not superstitious, are you?’
‘No. Only in so far as I think something would have brought you half-way across the world to me, even if it hadn’t been your own criminal tendencies,’ he told her teasingly.
She laughed softly.
‘It’s funny. I remember now that night I left America, and the lights of New York were slipping away behind us, I thought “I’m like the girl in all the fairy stories, setting out into the world alone. A new life, even a new identity. Where will my wanderings take me?” ’
He looked down at her and smiled as she lay there in the circle of his arm.
‘And I think,’ he said, ‘that you are satisfied with the place to which they brought you.’