She said nothing, but her eyes were questioning, and the man answered their interrogation almost gruffly.
"We've got to walk close to the edge," he said with the quiet of restrained passion. "You trust me, you say, and even before you said it I read it in your eyes. I want that same trust to be in them to-morrow.... I don't know how you feel, but I'm like the reforming drunkard—tortured by his thirst." He paused, then added, "I think it's just as well to walk off my restiveness if I can."
It was five o'clock when he returned, hot and weary from fast tramping in the blistering heat, but when he presented himself, as dusty as a miller to Conscience, who received him among the flowers of her garden, the woman recognized, from his face and the smile of self-victory in his eyes, that he had come back a dependable ally and not a dangerous enemy. In his voice as he hailed her was the old ring of comradeship—and it was almost cheerful. "Hurry into your bathing suit," he invited tersely. "The water is bluer than water ever was before."
Her eyes met his dubiously. She had not, like himself, burned out her wretchedness of spirit in muscular fatigue.
"I feel rather tired, Stuart," she demurred. But he answered decisively, "That's exactly why you need a plunge. You'll go in the tired housekeeper and come out Aphrodite rising from the foam."
"To-morrow perhaps—" she began, but he shook his head.
"If I'm any judge of weather the furies are brewing something in the line of a tempest. To-morrow will probably be a day of storm."
Under his forced lightness of speech, she realized the tenderness of solicitude—and acquiesced, because he wished it.
From her window as she changed into bathing things she saw the cove, blue as the Bay of Naples. After to-morrow, she thought, she would hate that cove. After to-morrow she must begin making her life over, and it would be like poverty's task of turning thread-bare seams.