A stain of duller red upon the girl's cheek would have betrayed some quickening of her thought, had he been looking at her, instead of out across the purple level of the sea, where, above Ballindra, the harbour hills were turning in the slanting sunlight from topaz to amethyst.
The smile of humorous toleration with which Maurice Caragh accepted half the perplexities of life had always seemed to her so completely to reveal his mind—like the pool before them, through which the light filtered to the very floor—that this dark humour of depreciation let out the sounding line through her fingers into unanchorable depths.
"I think you're a little hard," she said slowly; "women aren't vain, as a rule; at least not like that. It's their humility that makes them care so much to be admired."
"I see," he smiled. "But I don't object to the admiration; that's inevitable; only to the way it's paid."
"But how is a woman to know if you don't tell her?"
"Do you ask?" he said.
"I?" she questioned. "Why?"
"I thought the last fortnight would have taught you that," he said quietly.
Her eyes flashed upon him ere she could prevent them, and from the flash her cheeks took colour as though they faced a flame.
But she was playing with the shells in her hand again before he noticed that she had moved her head, but the tip of her forefinger trembled as she pushed the tiny pink heap across her palm.