“Daisies!” cried Cynthia. “Where can we get daisies?” and looked about her. Steep cobbled streets, the sands ahead.
“Let’s stop and get us a citronade, and I’ll ask,” suggested the diplomatic Nancy. While they sipped the sweet warmish drink from thick tumblers she chattered with the waitress. “It’s all right,” she reported. “There are pretty flowers for you to pick, my child. Oh, there’s your blonde friend’s boy friend, and all alone.”
Cynthia had noticed him too, furiously striding down the steep street. Where was the buttercup girl? “They were quarreling last night,” she said, watching the nervous wiry back as it turned the lower corner of the street, entered the hotel. “And then her father came in. She didn’t seem very happy today either.”
“Little Miss Fix-it,” teased Nancy. “What’s it to you? Come on now, we’ll go hunt daisies.”
At the very foot of the street where, at high tide the seas must wash, where boats lay, small and deserted on the yellow sand, footprints led along the base of the cliff. Here, rounding the turn, the wind blew freshly from off the coasts of England, small crabs scuttled to shelter as they passed and far far above them Saint Michel dominated his devil and the cock eternally crowed.
Above them suddenly rose steep cliffs covered with coarse grass, and, if not daisies, at least their French cousins. No houses here, though piles of rubble and a bit of crumbled wall told that the abbey buildings must once have straggled down the face of this cliff. Far above small peasant children climbed and called, or swung bare legs from an outcrop of rock, and still higher a small hunched figure sat all alone on a rock. Cynthia was about to say, “Oh, there’s the little American,” but remembering what Nancy had just called her, held her tongue and busied herself with collecting a bouquet for Mrs. Brewster’s room.
Presently wearying of this she sat on a stone to survey the steep climb she had already come and the sands beyond that. It seemed to her that the color of the sand had changed, darkened, in the past ten minutes. Idly she noted that the children had gone; already she could see them scampering past the rock at the base, saw them disappear. She looked back of her. Nothing here, no connection with the town. To get home one must go the way they had come. Just beyond where Nancy was still picking flowers was the American girl. Cynthia’s gaze took her in with the rest of the scene. Suddenly she was startled almost out of her wits by a small figure that tore past her, yelling at the top of his lungs.
She sprang to her feet, and was still more startled to see Nancy come pelting after the boy.
“La marée ... la marée montante ...”
“What is it?” asked Cynthia, gazing after the small figure that had passed. A good model that boy would be, with his wind blown curls, his startled eyes.