“Coming!” cried Nina. She sprang lightly up the hill, chattering as merrily as if she and the silent man beside her had spent the last half-hour flinging pebbles into the ocean.
They separated on the crest of the hill, and went to their respective tents. A few moments later Nina appeared at the supper-table with her disordered locks concealed by a network of sweet-brier. The effect was novel and bizarre, the delicate pink and green very becoming.
“Heaven knows when I’ll ever get it off,” she whispered to Thorpe, as she took the chair at his side. “It has three thousand thorns.”
The girls were in their highest spirit at the supper-table. Mr. McLane and Mr. Randolph were in their best vein, and Hastings and Molly Shropshire talked incessantly. Thorpe heard little that was said; he was consumed with the desire to be alone with Nina Randolph again.
But she would have no more of him that night. After supper, a huge bonfire was built on the edge of a jutting cliff, and the entire party sat about it and told yarns. The women stole away one by one. Nina was almost the first to leave.
The men remained until a late hour, and received calls from hilarious neighbours whose bonfires were also blazing. Don Tiburcio Castro dashed up at one o’clock, and invited Mr. Randolph to bring his party to a grand merienda on the last day but one of their week, and to a ball at the Mission Dolores on the evening following.
VIII
When the party broke up for the night Thorpe walked a half mile over the dunes, until, for any evidence of civilisation, he was alone in the wilderness, then lay down on the warm sand and took counsel with himself.
He had taken the plunge, and he had no regrets. He recalled his doubts, his certainty that the Randolph skeleton was not the figment of a girl’s morbid imagination, his analysis of a temperament which he was only beginning to understand, and wherein lay gloomy foreshadowings, the fact that her first appeal had been to his animalism and that the appeal had been direct and powerful. Until the morning of the elk-hunt, he had not admitted that he loved her; but in a flash he had realised her tragic and desolate position, little as he guessed the cause, and coincidently his greater love for her had taken form so definitely that he had not hesitated a moment to ask her to marry him. Later, he had persuaded himself that he was well out of it; but between that time and this he had allowed himself hardly a moment for meditation.