"Do you ever come here by yourself?" he asked, resting on the oars.
"I've always come by myself," she answered, looking down into his face, "that's why"—she hesitated for a moment—"that's why I didn't bring you before."
The reason might not have seemed explicit to another, but it carried a sense of privilege to Caragh's mind that troubled the look with which he acknowledged it.
"I hope I mayn't prove unworthy of it," he said gravely.
"I don't know," she answered, with an absent glance at him: "it's a very dear little beach."
He was willing to admit, when he landed, that it might be anything she pleased to call it, but there was chiefly wonder in his eye. The bands of tiny white and silver pebbles, and of tinier pink shells, made a floor so delicate, so incredibly dainty as seemed, in that land of legend, proof sufficient of a fairy's treading.
The water lay so still and clear against it that only by the brighter tint of the covered pebbles could the margin of the sea be told, and the moving tide that swayed the weed made all along the curved strand a little whispering song, unlike any other music in the world.
Lettice enjoyed Caragh's bewilderment for a moment, but stopped him as he was bringing the cable ashore.
"You must moor her out," she said.
"Oh, no!" he pleaded, "the tide's rising, and she'll look so jolly and so impossible nosing along the shore with all that water under her, on the very edge of an ocean."