“My heart always failed me over these early swims. You were so far from the shore, out in the ocean; no possible help at hand. I used to watch you through the telescope, and, knowing this, you would turn and smile and wave to me and speak my name. Often you dived into the bottomless deep of waters. Then your anxious wife could see nothing but an expanse of sky and ocean. After what seemed an hour of suspense, you would re-appear in the sparkling ripples, laughing, shaking the salt water from your eyes, and bounding along with the strength and grace of a splendid sea-lion. Then I would breathe again and slip back to bed as you neared the shore and I lost you under the lee of the cliff.
“But, when you came back to my arms, I used to hold you close to my beating heart and say: ‘Oh, Nigel, my dearest! Some day those treacherous waters will swallow you up, and you will come back to me no more.’
“‘I shall always come back to you, my sweet,’ you would make answer. ‘If I lay fifty fathoms deep, and you called, I should hear and come back.’
“Then you would quite suddenly fall asleep; but I would keep vigil, praying Heaven that you might never lie fifty fathoms deep, and loving the salt on my lips, as I softly kissed your damp hair.
“Nigel, do you remember?”
The man in the chair put out his hand, groping blindly for the glass, and moistened his lips before he made answer.
“I remember nothing,” he said.
“One lovely August evening we sat together on the shore. It was our baby’s birthday. She was a year old. It had been a happy, merry day. We had been up to the nursery, where, surrounded by soft, furry toys, she slept. We stood together on either side of her crib, looking down at the rose-petal face with its aureola of tumbled golden hair.
“‘Nothing of the Italian there,’ you remarked. Your dark colouring and vivid vitality came from an Italian grandfather on your mother’s side, from whom you also took your second name.
“‘I want a little Guido, some day,’ I whispered, as we turned away.