"She's shivering as if she were cold," Elizabeth thought, as she watched the diminishing figure.
It was high tide, and the deep blue waves were foam-crested. The wide sky was streaked with clouds, and a bright sun lay hot upon the sands. Elizabeth looked first at Moses' bobbing head, and then at the bobbing, rose-coloured parasol dwindling in the distance.
"Life is a curious thing," she said to herself, slowly, "it keeps changing so, getting better or worse all the time. Here's Moses and the Steppes, who were so perfectly hopeless and helpless, and there is an improvement in them. They are my friends and my responsibility—if I don't live up to it very well. Then here is Ruth Farraday, that I truly love, and everything about her is getting worse every minute, and it's all mixed up with me, somehow. I don't do much good, or anything, but it's mixed up with me all the same."
She knitted to the end of her row and pulled out her needle. She gave another long look at sea and sky.
"Everything is a part of everything," she said, a little confusedly. "Poor Buddy, dear."
She wrote him a long letter that night, and told him what Ruth had said, and then she tried not to think about him at all for the next few days. She was afraid for what she had done. She had had no word from him in answer to her letter announcing Ruth's engagement, and only the briefest line from her mother, who was evidently gravely anxious about her son's condition. She knew that Buddy was worse, and she knew that the letter she had written him had made him worse; how much worse, Elizabeth could not bear to think.
It was five days after her meeting with Ruth upon the beach that the evening mail brought her two letters, one in her mother's handwriting and one in Buddy's. Judidy brought them in and put them in her lap.
"We are going to lose Judidy next winter," her grandmother said when that young woman had blushed, giggled, and withdrawn to the back porch, from which the sound of a drawling, masculine voice was heard at intervals, interspersed with Judidy's high-pitched protestations. "She's going to be married, she tells me."
"Is she?" said Elizabeth, trying to subdue the dizziness she felt at the sight of Buddy's familiar scrawl.
"Your grandfather and I thought we'd give them a wedding. Judidy's folks won't. They are nice enough people, but peculiar—odd. They believe in saving trouble and expense on everything."