Kit laughed uproariously, and got up.
"I've finished for what I have received," she said, "and so we'll go out. Have you got a spade for me to dig in the sand with as I wade? Oh, there's the bezique-box. I think we'll play bezique instead. Is there a café or anything of the sort, where there will be a band. Bezique goes so well to a Strauss valse."
"There is a draper's shop and a church," said Ted. "That is all."
But after a couple of games the splendour of the evening weaned them from their cards. It had been a very hot day, but not long before sunset a cool wind was borne out of the sea, and they strolled out. Sunset was imminent in the west, and the land enmeshed in a web of gold. High in the zenith floated a few flushed feathers of cloud, and the sea was level and waveless—a polished surface of reflected brightness. The tide was on the ebb, and the smooth sand, wet from its retreat, was a mirror of the sky, a strip framed in the sea, and the high-water mark. Southward the land trended away in headland behind folded headland to an infinite distance of hazy and conjectured distances. The unbreathed air, a traveller over a hundred horizons of sea, was cool and tonic, and the whisper of the ripples crisp within the ear. And Kit with her childlike impressionableness, which was at once her danger and her charm, caught surely at the spirit of the free large spaces. She had taken off her hat, and walked firm and lithe along the shining ripple-fringed beaches, each footstep crushing for a moment the moisture out of the sand in a circle round her tread, and breathing deep, with open mouth, of the vivifying air. Like a chameleon she took instinctively the colour of her surroundings, and just now she was steeped in open air, freedom, and the great plains of sea and sky. She always gulped things down, camels and needles alike, thirsty of full sensations.
"Really, one's whole life is a series of mistakes, Ted," she said, "except in a few short moments like these. Why do we go to that rabbit-warren of a London, and live in little smoky boxes, when there is an empty sea-beach, and a great sea-wind within a few hours of us? Oh! I wish I was a fisherman, or a day labourer, or a gallon of sea-water, to stop in the open always."
Ted laughed.
"And if to-morrow is wet or cold, you will say, 'Why did we come to this God-forsaken German Ocean, when we could have stopped in our nice comfortable houses?'"
"I know I shall; and the worst of me is that I shall feel just as keenly as I feel this now. Jack called me a parasite once; he said I always found food in whatever I happened to be on. I dare say he is right. Oh, look at that bit of red seaweed on the sand! It looks as if it had been set, as one used to set butterflies; every little fibre is spread out separately. But if I pick it up, it will be just a stringy pulp. There are a great many morals to be drawn from that, and one is, 'Don't meddle.'"
"What a lesson for Tobys!" laughed Ted.
The sun set, and with the fading of the light they turned. Moment by moment the colours paled, and the evening iridescences turned gray and cold. Kit put on her hat; there was a chill in the air, and they walked faster. By the time they reached the hotel it was nearly dark, and the shining window-squares looked inviting and comfortable, and Kit mentally revoked her desire to be a gallon of sea-water. It was already time to dress for dinner, and they went up to the sitting-room together. Their bedrooms were on opposite sides of it, both communicating with it and with the passage outside, and as they dressed they talked loudly and cheerfully to each other through doors ajar, their conversation being punctuated by sounds of the sponge. Ted was ready first, but a few moments afterwards Kit came out of her room, and went downstairs with him, still in a fever of high spirits, but with all the cool sanity of the great expanses driven out of her worthless little soul, and dressed in red.