“I do—a big one. But I’m going to forget it.”
“Please do. I appreciate your coming more than I can tell you.”
He looked down at her, walking beside him among the throng of strangers, and experienced a curious and entirely new sense of possession. He was so accustomed to the necessity of steering a strictly neutral course where women were concerned, that to be off like this alone with this amazingly attractive and interesting member of what was to Black practically the forbidden class, was almost an unprecedented experience. He was astonished to find himself quite shaken with joy in the sense of her nearness, and in the knowledge that for this day, at least, he might be sure of many hours with her, never afterward to be forgotten. Surely, that fact of the separation, so near at hand, which might so easily be for good and all, justified him in forcing the issue of this one day’s companionship, whatever might be its outcome.
In the second train it was again too hot to think of taking the fifty-minute ride in a stifling coach, and Black again sought the rear platform, found it unoccupied, and took Jane to it. The noise of the train made talking impossible, and the pair swayed and clung to the rail in silent company until at length the journey was over. They alighted at a little breeze-swept station, the only passengers for this point, which Mrs. Devoe had told Black was a solitary one.
“Oh-h!” Jane drew a long, refreshed breath. “Isn’t this delicious? How grateful I am to you for making me come—now that I am here and feel this first wonder of sea air. It’s ages since I’ve taken the time to get within sight of the sea.”
“Do you mean to say I made you come?”
“Of course you did. Imposed your masculine will upon mine, and brought me whither I would not—which sounds scriptural, somehow—where did I get that phrase? All the time I was dressing I was saying to myself that I not only could not but would not. I am in the habit of making my own decisions. I really can’t account for it.”
“I can. This is to be a day of days in both your experience and mine—it was for us to have, together, before we go across where there can be no such days. Our friendship is a thing that demands a chance to talk both our affairs over in a way we never can back there. Don’t you feel that?”
“Yes—I suppose that was why I came. How straightforwardly you put it—like your straightforward self!— Oh, how glorious this is!”
Her head was up, she was walking sturdily erect beside him over a white road hard and smooth with ground clamshells, that ideal road of the sea district. Far away stretched the salt marshes, with a low-lying gray cottage in the distance—the only one along a mile of coast. The breeze, direct from the ocean, made the temperature seem many degrees cooler than that of the inland left behind.