It was the Bride and George Keets who seemed to be thinking, pointing, gesticulating, in the only perfect harmony. Even at this distance, and swathed as they were in hastily adjusted oil-skins, a curiously academic sort of dignity stamped their every movement. Nothing but sheer intellectual determination to prove that their minds were normal would ever tempt either one of them to violate a Host's "No Trespass" sign!
Nothing academic about Paul Brenswick's figure! With one yellow elbow crooked to shield the rain from his eyes he stood estimating so many probable feet of this, so many probable feet of that. He was an engineer! Perspectives were his playthings! And if there was any new trick about perspectives that he didn't know—he was going to solve it now no matter what it cost either him or anybody else!
More like a young colt than anything else, like a young colt running for its pasture-bars, the May Girl dashed vainly up and down the edge of the cliff. Nothing academic, nothing of an engineer—about any young colt! If the May Girl reached "the Bungalow on the Rocks" it would be just because she wanted to!
Ann Woltor's reaction was the only one that really puzzled me. Drawn back a little from the others, sheltered transiently from the wind by a great jagged spur of gray rock but with her sombre face turned almost eagerly to the rain, she stood there watching with a perfectly inexplainable interest the long white blossomy curve of foam and spray which marked the darkly submerged ledge of rock that connected the red-tiled bungalow with the beach just below her. Ann Woltor certainly was no prankish child. Neither was it to be supposed that any particular problem of perspective had flecked her mind into the slightest uneasiness. Ann Woltor knew that the bungalow was there! Had spent at least nine hours in it on the previous day! Lunched in it! Supped in it! Proved its inherent prosiness! Yet even I was puzzled as she crept out from the shelter of her big boulder to the very edge of the cliff, and leaned away out still staring, always at that wave-tormented ledge.
From the hyacinth-scented shadows just behind me I heard a sudden little laugh.
"I'll wager you a new mink muff," said my Husband quite abruptly, "that Ann Woltor gets there first!"
CHAPTER V
IN this annual Rainy Week drama of ours, one of the very best parts I "double" in, is with the chambermaid, making beds!
Once having warned my guests of this occasional domestic necessity, I ought, I suppose, to feel absolutely relieved of any embarrassing sense of intrusion incidental to the task. But there is always, somehow, such an unwarrantable sense of spiritual rather than material intimacy connected with the sight of a just deserted guest-room. Particularly so, I think, in a sea-shore guest-room. A beach makes such big babies of us all!
Country-house hostesses have never mentioned it as far as I can remember. Mountains evidently do not recover for us that particular kind of lost rapture. Nor even green pine woods revive the innocent lusts of the little. But in a sea-shore guest-room, every fresh morning of the world, as long as time lasts, you will find on bureau-top desk or table, mixed up with chiffons and rouges, crowding the tennis rackets or base balls, blurring the open sophisticate page of the latest French novel, that dear, absurd, ever-increasing little hoard of childish treasures! The round, shining pebbles, the fluted clam shell, the wopse of dried sea-weed, a feather perhaps from a gull's wing! Things common as time itself, repetitive as sand! Yet irresistibly covetable! How do you explain it?