She sprang up. "I won't have you mocking at me. Or at Julian!"
"I don't mock at Julian."
"Oh, only at me?" She laughed a little uncertainly and then became grave again, but not, Napier felt, unfriendly. "You know, his father has gone home to Scotland. His mother, too. And Julian is here." They were silent a moment. "And I just wish they'd stayed in Germany," she burst out. "They are horrid to Julian. They've as good as told him they're ashamed of him. But they don't deserve to have a son like Julian. If he was my son...."
Napier smiled. "Well, if he were your son?"
"I'd know how to treat him. I'd know rather better than I do now," she wound up, with her astonishing candor.
Hardly two yards away the inrushing surf foamed as white as boiling milk among the boulders.
"How long," she asked, with something breathless in her manner, "before the tide reaches as far as where we are?"
"Not long." Even as he spoke, one of those waves that will sometimes outrace its fellows rushed up the beach and flung itself in thunder against the outward barrier. In spume and froth it ran whitely in and out nearly to the upper rocks, filling all the place with motion and a dazzle of moonlit foam.
"It seems to set the rocks moving. And the noise! Doesn't it make you dizzy?" she said. "It does me."
"Then come higher up."