"Don't!" she stammered. "Don't torture me, don't tempt me any more. Don't let me think--either now or ever--that this love of ours is only--only physical. Because, if I thought that, I'd kill myself."
And a moment afterwards, she was gone.
CHAPTER XII
1
Ponto the Dane, a piebald hummock of utter contentment, slapped his vast stern on the sands; woke; and rose to his haunches.
At gaze into the sun-dazzle, Ponto's slitty eyes could just discern the twin rock buttresses of Chilworth Cove, the sea-water eddying translucent between them, and, forging through the sea-water, a man's head. White birds, which Ponto after one or two dignified experiments had decided uncatchable, strutted the beach or circled lazily round the buttresses. His mistress slept, sun-bonneted in her long deck-chair, a smile on her lips.
"This," mused the great dog, "is a very pleasant place."
"This," dreamed the great dog's mistress, "is paradise."
Chilworth Cove lies far from the track of motor char-à-bancs in the unspoiled West Country. Inshore from its tongue of hot gold sands, the wild flowers riot; and back along the fritillary-haunted pathway through the wild flowers, Chilworth Ghyll leads to Chilworth Port--a handful of thatch-roofed, pink-washed cottages whereon the clematis spreads its purple stars and the honeysuckle droops coral clusters for the loudly-questing bee.
Once the sea filled the Ghyll; once, from the ancient well-head midway of the streetless "port," men drew water for their ships; once seafarers in hose and doublet with strange oaths and stranger tales on their lips would sit drinking in the parlor of the ancient alehouse. But to-day never a ship and hardly a "foreigner" comes where Chill Down upswells warm-breasted as a woman to the blue and Chill Common sweeps wave on wave of heathered ridges to a houseless horizon.