Mary Alice flushed. "Now I think you ought to let me tell," she began, with downcast eyes. And so she told: how she had come there, and how she had stayed, like the little mouse under the Queen's chair, and how glad she was to have seen from a distance a little of this splendour and great society, and how gladder still to hang her borrowed white and silver away and be done with it and all it stood for and go back to her gown of crash and her chimney-corner place in life, "which I can now see," she added "is the place for dreams and sweet companionship."
"And when I get back, will you be there?" he cried, eagerly.
"When you get back I will be there," she promised.
After that they sat and talked for long and long, while the blue sea sparkled in the summer morning sun. When, at length, they rose to go, there was a light that never shone on land or sea in his face and in hers. There had been no further promises; only that one: "When you get back I will be there." But each heart understood the other, and she rejoiced to wait further declaration of his love until he could, according to his tender fancy, make it to her as in his "dream come true."
On the beach as they strolled back, it was her eyes—shining with a soft, new radiance—that first caught sight of something; her fancy that first grasped its significance. "Look!" she cried. In a bowl-like hollow of a big brown rock, the receding tide had left a little pool of sea-water. "It's left behind—this bit of the infinite, unresting sea!" she said. "Who knows what far, far shores it's come from? And now, here it is, and the great mother-sea's gone off and left it."
He smiled tenderly at her sweet whimsy. "The great mother-sea will come back for it at sundown," he reminded her.
"Yes—yes"—perhaps it was the coming separation between the two that made her voice quaver so sympathetically—"the Infinite always comes back for us. But we don't always remember that it will! This is such a little bit of the great sea. Maybe it never was left alone before; maybe it doesn't know how surely the waters that left it behind will come back for it this evening. Maybe it's—it's lonesome. I—I think I know how it feels."
"And I," he said.
"Next time you feel that way will you remember this brown rock and the tide that is so surely coming back tonight?" she asked.
"Indeed I will," he told her.