“But one day I——.”
She freed herself from him gently. “Neither of us can tell.”
In the days that followed, when they walked and swam and sailed together, Harry recognized what Kay had meant when she said that Peter hadn’t learnt to do without her. With the end of his hope of Cherry, all his affections had flown homeward and had concentrated on the love of his sister. It seemed as though he made an effort to find her sufficient for his heart’s cravings. To all other women his eyes were blind. The thought that any other woman should come into his life seemed never to occur to him.
Glory—she wrote to him, as Harry had written to Kay, with conscientious regularity. But he read her letters aloud, obviously without editing; they were serious letters like her eyes, searching and quiet, with a hint of need behind them, and with bursts of fun when she told of the struggles of her stepfather and Mr. Grace to run The Winged Thrust both genially and for profit.
And the man who lived to-day as though it were a thousand years ago—a week after Kay had first met him, they sailed across the gulf to discover him. They found him in the castle painting.
“Ha! The little English girl!”
He threw down his brushes and came toward her with his arms extended. He gathered her hands together into his own and bent over her intently with his eyes of blue fire, “I thought I’d lost my earth-maiden.”
That was all. So long as Harry and Peter were present he was no more than a shaggy artist, a little self-important, a little shy. When they had walked off to explore the town it was different.
He picked her up as though she were a child, and sat her on the broken wall, where the blue sea swept behind her shoulders and the white clouds raced through her corn-colored hair. For a while he was utterly silent, touching in sketches of her, testing various poses. The smell of wild thyme mingled with that of flowers, fermenting in the sunshine. From far below the wash of waves rose coolly.
Presently he spoke. “You stopped a long while away. Every day I’ve been here watching for you. I don’t often watch for anybody. If people don’t come——,” he snapped his fingers, “I begin again. I begin with someone who won’t keep me waiting.”