"Tom," she said, in a low voice, turning to him in swift appeal, why she knew not, "let us get away from all this; we might go along the point and look for clams, as we used to do. Remember, it is the last I shall see of you; so don't talk about manners and being wanted; don't think of what other people think."
She spoke petulantly, but there were sudden tears in her eyes. Yet as they moved off together neither of then realised that a fateful moment had come and gone; that the trivial words covered an unconscious revolt of one side of her woman's nature against the other, and that if, instead of hunting clams like a couple of children, he had taken her hand and told her the truth of love and marriage, as he had seen it in life, she would have turned instinctively from the world's apotheosis of passion, and so have found a compass to guide her out of danger; but Tom Kennedy, being conscious that he himself was once more under the glamour which had come and gone many times already even in his sober life, could not find it in his heart to decry it utterly. So they stalked clams instead, advancing on tiptoe over the wet sand with eyes alert for every sign of an air-hole, and then pouncing like a cat on a mouse to seize the collapsing tube before it sank down, down, into the depths of gravel where even finger nails could not follow it. And to them, as they laughed and hunted, came the Reverend James, restless as ever, yet showing to advantage in a sport which he had practised from his barefoot childhood.
It was good to see his fair, florid face come up red with smug triumph from each dive as he added another clam to the heap, until Marjory forgot everything else in emulation, and Tom Kennedy, smiling at her eagerness, sate down to a cigarette beside Lord George, who, engaged in the same business, was watching the children paddle in the shallows.
A silent, yet sympathetic audience were these two men of middle age, smiling to themselves over the gay voices and childish sallies. Over Eve's eleventh ineffectual attempt to swallow an oyster which would have been successful if Adam hadn't made her laugh; over Marjory's indignant claim to a clam, which, during the dispute, disappeared for ever. Smiling, too, over Blasius' solemn face as he informed daddy that there was a "big crawly wild beast down there wif wobbly legs, and Blazeths wanted daddy's hand. Blazeths wathn't afwaid, but he wanted daddy's hand."
The incoming tide was drowning the round brown heads of the boulders out on the far point, as those two red ones, so curiously alike, bent over the "wild beast wif wobbly legs," which Adam and Eve, with wide-eyed superiority, said was nothing but a crab, a tiny crab! A heron, driven from its last inch of seaweed, flapped slowly across the bay, its trailing feet almost touching the water, and the sea-pyots circled screaming round the invaders of their happy hunting-ground. In the bend of the bay beneath a clump of alders showed a cluster of gay dresses busy about a tablecloth, and above them, in wooded curves merging into sheer slopes of rock and bent, rose Ben Morven. Half-way up, right in the open, a single holly tree, like a black shadow, marking the turn to the old burying-ground. Lord George came back from the wild beast with a sober face, and eyes still watching that little red head, bent now over a stick with which the wobbly legs were being boldly prodded to a walk.
"Queer start, children--aren't they?" he remarked confidentially, as he lit another cigarette. "I never thought of it before I married, give you my word. I suppose men don't--more's the pity." He gave a glance at his companion's face, and went on with more assurance: "You see no one ever talks of the paternal instinct; the women are supposed to have it all their own way, in the maternal business, and it's a shame, for a man needs that sort of thing more than they do. A woman can't be done out of her motherhood, but a man loses everything except a passing pleasure if he doesn't keep straight. Look at that boy, Kennedy! He is the very moral of me, and I had to whack him the other day. Well, I assure you, that I felt for the first time in my life that I was immortal--that I had a stake in time and eternity. Why don't they teach us this when we are young? Why don't they say something about it in the marriage service, instead of letting a couple of young fools undertake responsibilities for which they are not fit?"
Tom Kennedy shook his head. "Because we are not brave enough to face our own instincts and call a spade a spade. I served a few years in India once, and Hindooism is, I think, the only religion which sets personal feelings aside utterly; and there the idea has been overlaid with a horrible sensuality. Though on the whole it is not more sickening than our artificial sentiment. But it's a weary subject. Everyone talks of it, and yet no one cares to go back to the beginning; to give up the romance----"
His eyes wandered to Marjory, and he was silent. It was true. When all was said and done he craved for it.
"Well," remarked Lord George, judgmatically, after a pause, "there is something wrong, somewhere. Take my own case. I married, as most fellows do, to please myself, without a thought of the consequences. And though, of course, some romance is necessary to make a man give up his club and undertake the responsibility of a boy like Blazes--Good Lord! and I promised his mother to keep him out of mischief!"
The last words being evoked by the sight of his youngest born prone on his back kicking madly in six inches of water, with the crab attached to his big toe.