“The surf doesn’t roar tonight, the way it does sometimes,” the lad said, dropping at last to the rock at the girl’s side. “Watch now when the next wave breaks, how all of the spray glistens.”
For a few moments neither spoke and, in Gwynette’s starved soul something stirred again, this time more distinctly. It was an intense love of nature that she had inherited, with Jenny, from a wandering poet-missionary father. She caught her breath when spray and mist dashed almost up to them. “O, it is lovely, lovely!” she said, for once being perfectly sincere and forgetting herself. “I never saw anything so exquisite.”
Charles was more than pleased. Perhaps he was to find the soul of the girl at his side. Harold did not believe that she had one. As he glanced down at her now and then her real joy in the beauty of the scene before them, he concluded that she was fully as beautiful as her sister.
“I wonder where the silver path leads,” she said whimsically.
“I wish I had a sailboat here,” the lad exclaimed, “and if you would be my passenger, we’d sail over that silver stream and find where it leads.”
The girl looked up at him. Her new emotion had changed the expression of her face. It was no longer cynical and cold. “Our father had a sailboat, but for years it has been hanging to the rafters of the boathouse. Perhaps Harold would like to take it down, now that he is to be here all summer.”
“Good. I’ll ask him!” the lad was enthusiastic. “I suppose you wonder how I, a farmer from the inland, learned to sail. It was the year before mother died that we all went to Lake Tahoe, hoping that the change of air would benefit her. A splendid sailboat was one of the accessories of the cabin we rented, and how I reveled in it. I do hope Harold will loan me his boat. It seems calm enough beyond the surf. In fact I saw several boats today evidently racing around a buoy over toward the town.”
“Yes, there is a yacht club at Santa Barbara and they have a wonderful harbor. Harold has been invited to join the club. I would like to attend one of their dances.”
The girl hesitated to ask her companion if he could dance. Probably not, having been brought up on an isolated ranch. To her relief the question was answered without having been asked.
“I believe I like skating better than dancing, but, when the music pleases me and my partner, I do enjoy dancing.” Gwyn found that she must reconstruct her preconvinced ideas about Dakota farmers. Then, after silently watching the waves for a thoughtful moment, he turned toward her as he smilingly said: “Miss Gwynette, do you suppose that you and I could go to the next Yacht Club dance?”