It would have augured ill for the next chapters of her serial had she depended for "copy" upon what she was to see of that French oyster-park that afternoon. Neither she nor the boy, who was her guide, had anything but a cursory eye, an abstracted mind, to give to that lightsome, airy picture of wide sea and sand, mapped out with stakes and sills and basins, and peopled with busy barefoot women in their picturesque garb of black sunbonnet, print jumper and long scarlet trousers.
Up and down the narrow paths stepped those long slender feet of Mrs. Cartwright, shod in the brown canvas sandalettes of the neighbourhood, with lacings that clipped her to mid-calf like the cothurne ribbons of a dancer. Before her tramped the high leather boots of the Flying-man; crunch—crunch—crunch, over the gravel and chipped shell. But still the paths that each was treading remained those of the secret labyrinth....
She, behind all the light composure of her manner, was more than disturbed. She was touched down to that mingling of inner tears and inner laughter, which was her very self. He cared for her, then, this charming lad, whose heart so far had known only his own people, only that other lad who had been his observer and his chum. He loved her. There could be no mistaking the tone in which he'd blurted out: "Don't talk to me about other men you've loved; I can't bear it!" Yes; he was hers—just as Keith Cartwright had been hers, and young Rolfe, who was killed on the Frontier, and Rex Mannering in Nineteen-oh-one, and the man whose sea-blue regard had laughed through such black fringing lashes, and the others. She ought to have known. Here was this boy.... At twenty-two!... She had seen such affairs.... She had watched, not too sympathetically, the mature woman who receives the attentions of her son's contemporaries. Once she had heard a friend of hers, in all the glory of her twenty-four summer, declare, "It's such an elderly habit, letting youths younger than oneself fetch and carry for one. And oh, Claudia! I don't think you or I will ever have to know the humiliation of loving a boy!" Mrs. Cartwright had lost sight of this friend, who was a year older than herself.
Perhaps the unforseen had happened to her too. Certainly Mrs. Cartwright had never dreamed that this thing would ever happen to herself; to become at her age the object of a lad's first love. It made her feel, at the same time, suddenly old—and suddenly young.
Outwardly unchanged, she let her gaze sweep the flat stretches of sand before her, and then rest upon a parqueuse who waded by, a vivid figure in scarlet and black, carrying a square rope-bottomed oyster-basket.
"Wonderfully picturesque those wide black sunbonnets the women wear," Mrs. Cartwright commented. "Curious to think they're a survival of our occupation of this part of France, all those centuries ago."
"Are they? by Jove," was all that young Awdas replied. "That's interesting."
But for him, too, what he said was as a man talks in his sleep; what he saw about him was less clear than the landscape of a dream. In his heart the boy was awed and exultant. He had told her. It had leapt from his lips, rather. He was conscious of new power within him; something of the feeling that had been his on the morning when he had first gone up on a "solo." Now she knew what he had to say to her—for he would say the rest of it presently. Not yet; not yet....
They pottered about the oyster-park, talking of oyster-culture. They had tea in the town, discussing the various tea-shops of their preference in London and Paris. Then he asked her if she were too tired to walk home and would like to take the little tramway; he knew he ought to ask her that, but he hoped inwardly that she would agree to walk. He breathed again when she protested that she was never tired. They took to the forest-path again, now gilded by the sun's rays, pointing through the pine-trunks; beyond the fringing branches the glimpse of sea and sky had changed from corn-cockle-blue to saffron-yellow. They walked, talking of those other fair woods of France that the War had turned into treeless, blasted wastes, spun over by webs of barbed wire. And then they came to that rise in the ground of the forest where the arbutus bushes seemed to fall back, and whence they had caught the first glimpse of the sea. It was here that he had spoken, on their way out. It was here that, on their way home, silence fell suddenly upon them. As if by tacit consent, they stopped walking. He turned to her.