"Well," he said, achieving an effect of jauntiness, "and what's your opinion, Miss Nan?"
"They don't understand you," she said gravely.
"And do you understand me?" he laughed.
"Yes. Because I'm like that myself. They call me fickle, too. But it's only that we haven't—hadn't"—she amended with that sudden summer lightning in her eyes—"hadn't met The One." If she came closer still, it seemed not to be by her own volition, but in the same way as she had spoken—at the bidding of some influence outside them both. Napier half turned from the too-disturbing nearness and instinctively put out a hand to the boulder, shoulder-high, just in front of him. But his hand moved short of its goal, unguided by a mind that was awhirl in a maelstrom where duties, inclinations, friendships, loves, all churned in an eddy of such surpassing swiftness that the brain reeled and the heart forgot its rhythm.
"Always thinking—but why does your hand shake so?"—the girl's voice was so low, that he hardly heard it above the surf, as she hurried on. "Maybe it's this one. No? Then perhaps it's that. And always wrong—till one day—in the hall—" a very passion of triumph thrilled through her question, "Wasn't it in the hall at Kirklamont?"
"Nan!" he cried out.
And she, on a note that the surf took up and carried out to sea, cried, "Gavan!" On whose initiative neither knew, they were clinging together. They cared as little for sea water as did the rocks. The two stood there like one—as if through all the moons to come they would bide as steadfast in their rapture as the rocks in foam.
When she drew her face away from his, and they looked at each other, it was with the knowledge that the wash of a greater sea than this they stood beside had flung them, companion castaways, on the shore of a new world.
She had thrown back her head. The scarf fell down over her shoulder to her feet, a tiny cascade to join the whiteness of sea water. All veils had been stripped off for that moment of uttermost joy, before the man cried sharply, "Julian!" and his arms fell down to his sides.
"Julian!" the girl echoed, aghast. She stumbled back a step. He didn't try to save her. She fell against the rock. Her hand, that tried to break the fall, was wrenched at the wrist. She hardly knew it at the time.