I had again begun to move away when he stopped me the second time.
"Miss Adare, what's your first name? Mine's Lawrence, as you know."
If I laughed a little it was to conceal my discomfort at this abrupt approach to the intimate.
"I'm rather sorry for my name," I said, apologetically. "You see my father was one of those poetically loyal Canadians who rather overdo the thing. My eldest sister should have been Victoria, because Victoria was the queen. But the Duchess of Argyll was in Canada at that time—and very nice to father and mother—and so the first of us had to be Louise. He couldn't begin on the queens till there was a second one. That's poor Vic; while I'm—I know you'll shout—I'm Alexandra. If there'd been a fourth she'd have been a Mary; but poor mother died and the series stopped."
He shook hands rather gravely. "Then I shall think of you as Alexandra."
"If you are going to think of me at all," I managed to say, with a little moue, "put me down as Alix. That's what I've always been called."
CHAPTER IV
I was glad of the fog. It was cool and refreshing; it was also concealing. I could tramp along under its protection with little or no fear of being seen. Wearing tweeds, thick boots, and a felt hat, I was prepared for wet, and as a Canadian girl I was used to open air in all weathers. The few stragglers generally to be seen on the Cliff Walk having rushed to their houses for shelter, I had the rocks and the breakers, the honeysuckle and the patches of dog-roses, to myself. In the back of my mind I was fortified, too, by the knowledge that dampness curls my hair into pretty little tendrils, so that if I did meet any one I should be looking at my best.
The path is like no other in the world. I have often wondered why the American writer-up of picturesque bits didn't make more of it. Trouville has its Plage, and Brighton its King's Road, and Nice its Promenade des Anglais, but in no other kingdom of leisure that I know anything about will you find the combination of qualities, wild and subdued, that mark this ocean-front of the island of Aquidneck. Neither will you easily come elsewhere so near to a sense of the primitive human struggle, of the crude social clash, of the war of the rights of man—Fisherman's Rights, as this coast historically knows them—against encroachment, privilege, and seclusion. As you crunch the gravel, and press the well-rolled turf, and sniff the scent of the white and red clover and Queen Anne's lace that fringe the precipice leaning over the sea, you feel in the air those elements of conflict that make drama.
In clinging to the edge of the cliff, in twisting round every curve of the shore line, in running up hill and down dale, under crags and over them, the path is, of course, not the only one of its kind. You will find the same thing anywhere on the south coast of England or the north coast of France. But in the sum of human interest it sucks into the three miles of its course I can think of nothing else that resembles it. As guaranteeing the rights of the fisherman it is, so I believe, inalienable public property. The fisherman can walk on it, sit on it, fish from it, right into eternity. So much he has secured from the past history of colony and state; but he has done it at the cost of making himself offensive to the gentlemen whose lawns he hems as a seamstress hems a skirt.