"Yes. Yes!" urged the boy.
"No," denied the girl's wise young voice. "See here; I'll be in London, and you will be there in a month. There's plenty of time. You'll come over then.... Then we can think of it.... Then maybe we'll talk of it again...."
"Oh, will we," muttered Jack Awdas in a voice of utter expressionlessness. For the moment he was ready to say nothing more.
Silence fell between them.
Each full of thought, they ascended and descended the belt of softly-rolling dunes and came to where the sand had drifted half-way up the trunks of the growing pines.
Suddenly Golden gave a little exclamation. "Oh, look; what's this?"
"What's what?" he asked, stopping beside her.
"I thought it was a cute little flower that was growing up the tree," said the girl with down-bent head, "but look, it's sown on to a ribbon, and it's got itself wound way round the branch——"
She was disentangling the object that had taken her eye; a couple of lengths of ribbon, faded to white by the sea breeze and stitched to a little padded square of satin, once mauve, now pale as the sand.
"What is it?" she wondered.