It was almost eighteen months since he had first brought The Kitten here. They had raced down the hill too, but at the foot he had swung her to the circle of his arms and kissed her madly. She had returned his kisses, until, both a little exhausted, they lay on the sand, his head in her lap, and her fingers had wandered in his hair, coming, every few minutes, to rest hotly on his lips.
Herrick looked at Jean and wondered. She had never kissed a man as The Kitten had kissed him. Would she ever? What was she thinking of, smiling out over the gray sea? In that passionate, throbbing emptiness she seemed as unconscious of him as if he were one of the gray cliffs. She was as far away and impersonal as the wind sweeping indifferently over the friendly little grasses.
In obedience to his unspoken wish, Jean turned.
"It's the sounds," she said, as if Herrick must have been following her thoughts. "If there weren't any sounds in Nature, pagans would never have invented a God. It's so impossible to imagine a silent Force creating a world where the wind shrieks and the sea roars and you can almost hear the earth breathe. It seems as if there must be a personal god somewhere, a huge, powerful man who needs these voices to talk with."
She had been thinking about God!
Herrick, without answering, drew farther back into the cove. He turned from Jean to the open grayness, and a terror of its immensity forced through every effort to keep it out. In the whole world there was nothing but loneliness, an actual, positive, palpable loneliness, as gray and chill as the sea, as all pervading as the boom of the surf far out on the rocky bar.
"'And who knows but that God, beyond our guess,
Sits weaving worlds out of loneliness.'"
"Did you write that?"
For a moment Herrick stared and then he laughed. She would always do it, make him feel old and spotted, and then whirl him up to the heights by a belief in his power.