Mrs. Cartwright went up to her room, but she did not pack those bags of hers at once.
Instead, she put on her coat, tied a scarf over her head, changed her shoes, and went for a walk.
She knew that she must tire herself out. She had thought she was rather tired already from her tussle with the waves that afternoon, but that wasn't enough. She must be more exhausted before she could sleep for a few hours. She would order them to call her very early in the morning, so that she could be packed and off before any of the other visitors had left their rooms.
She set out, and she couldn't have told anybody in what direction. A path was soft—probably with pine-needles—beneath her feet. Before her eyes there was a striping of light on darkness; still a moon between the trees.
She walked. She could not have said off-hand what she thought about as she swung along. Not many definite thoughts filled her mind. Only a very definite picture of young Awdas's fair eaglet face, looking with startled and pleased surprise into the face of that beautiful girl. One look; the boy had just been taken aback at the sight of a stranger, and such an unusually pretty one. Then and there Claudia Cartwright didn't herself know why she knew that this, the look that did not seem to mean anything, meant ... everything.
It meant that she, the woman at her last love affair who had been within an inch of accepting the proposal of that boy, must begin to pay, already, for her one moment of ecstasy.
The coming of that girl had stopped not one, but all kisses for her.
She knew what was coming between that boy, all awakened and malleable from his first passion, and that girl. They were heritors of an age in which Love has quickened his pace to keep up with the double-march of war.
She was resigned. She had foreseen it. Hadn't she said to him, "Wait until you see me beside a real young girl"? It had come upon her rather abruptly, that was all, but she need not really allow herself to suffer....
She whistled a little tune between her teeth as she swung along. She was thinking of nothing, she was just moving quickly and regularly, as a mechanical toy that has been wound up to go for a certain time before the machinery runs down.