"I can't think why we don't all go paddling, I can't," said May.
"Oh, why ever not—not with young Frank?" cried Jenny, clapping her hands.
"Of course."
"And Granfa must come," Jenny insisted.
"Oh, no, no, no," declared Granfa, smiling very proudly at the suggestion. "No, no, no! But I might go along with 'ee and pick a few wrinkles off the rocks."
Jenny thought how imperative it was for Maurice to be out of these planned allurements of summer. She would never enjoy herself, if all the time she felt he were close by, liable to appear suddenly. Certainly she would see him to-morrow.
"We might even bathe," said May dauntlessly.
"Well, don't 'ee tell Zack, then," Granfa advised. "For I suppose he can see the devil in the deep sea so clear as anywhere else. That man's got a nose for evil, I believe."
The sun was now hanging over the marsh in a dazzling haze of gold in which the midges danced innumerable. Long shadows threw themselves across the hills. The stream of light dried up as the sun went down into the sea. Cool scented airs, heralds of night, traveled up the valley; traveled swiftly like the spray of fountains.
Jenny went to bed soon after half-past nine. It was scarcely dark. Along her sill were great crimson roses like cups of cool wine, and from every ghostly white border of the garden came up the delicious odor of pinks in full June bloom. Moths were dancing, fluttering, hovering: a large white owl swept past in a soundless curve. And while she brooded upon this perfumed silence, away in London the girls were trooping down for the second ballet, were giving the last touch with a haresfoot to their carmine beauty, were dabbing the last powder on their cheeks or rubbing the liquid white upon their wrists and hands. How hot it must be in the theater. She heard quite plainly the tinkle of the sequins and spangles as the girls came trooping down the stone stairs into the wings to wait there for the curtain's rise. Then she perceived in the dim light Old Man Veal diligently cleaning his master's gun. Wishing he would not sit there underneath her window, she turned back into the tall, shadowy room and lit the candle. Soon she heard his retreating footsteps, and watched him go down the garden path with the slim and wicked gun beneath his arm. Young Frank, rose-misted with dreams of butterflies and painted rubber balls, lay in his hooded cot. Shading him with her hand, which the candlelight made lucent as a shell, she watched him lying there, his fingers clasped tightly round a coral hung with silver bells, his woolly lamb beside his cheek. Jenny wondered, if she had been a boy, whether she would have looked exactly like young Frank. Then she fell to speculating whether, had he belonged to her and Maurice, he would have been the same dear rogue as now. Oh, he was hers, hers only, and whatever man were his father, he would be nothing more than hers!