His prediction, however, only applied to himself, for Lettice ate even less than usual; an amount, he had once declared, absurdly incompatible with her splendid air of health.
She offered him no assistance in clearing up, but he showed a proper sense of his privilege, by refusing even to throw the lobster claws into the sea. Lettice smiled at the chaos of fragments he insisted on repacking.
"Bridget will have ideas of your economy when she opens that," she suggested.
"She'll guess perhaps that we lunched in Paradise," he said.
They walked to the limits of it when he had finished, and sat on the outermost spur of rock.
The ocean was like glass; yet the water pulsed to and fro past them between the long limestone ledges, as it rose and fell with the breath of the sleeping blue breast of the sea.
And the tender sounds of it never ceased. Soft thumps in the blind tunnels beneath them, a crystal kiss that whitened an edge of stone, the whisper of clear rillets that ran up and tinkled down again, finding no pool to hold them; and, under all, the brushing, backwards and forwards in the moving water, of the yellow tangle of weed.
Caragh remained but a short time in the seat he had chosen. Rising, he stood at the margin of the sea, shifting his footing now and then, to scan some fresh wonder of colour, and with his ears intent on the soft complexity of sound. He seemed entirely to have forgotten his companion's presence, and Lettice watched him with an interest which became annoyed.
"One would think you had never seen such a thing before," she said.
He turned at the sound of her words, but came more slowly to their meaning.