"Don't!" He said quickly. "Don't you talk like that."
For a second they were silent.
The sun was breaking through the dwindling thickness of the mist. He could see it lifting in a faint gray line, uncovering the reach of the flat salt marshes with their dank yellowed grasses; a thin silver net of it hung for a second between the sky and the earth, and was gone.
From the base of the chalk cliffs came the sound of the sea lapping and lapping with insistent cunning.
She dropped his hand and she stood there looking up to him, scanning his white face with those childlike eyes of hers.
"You live up here because of the sea, Mister?"
"Yes."
"You ever feel the sea's something—alive, like you and me?"
"You—feel—that—too?"
"Yes," she said slowly, "and I knew you felt it, because the first time I saw you—why—you're somehow—something like the sea."