"Yes."
He put his hands in his pockets and puffed his cigar to a glow.
"Quite ready to fight the world, ain't you, cousin?"
"The world."
"——but not me, eh? Oh! I keep my word. I'm Cicispeo."
"Who?"
"The man who's history I've just been telling you."
"Why are you taking all this trouble then?"
"Good! I like a 'facer' sometimes. Well, it's because I admire pluck. Because I saw you swim a mile out at Palèze. Oh! I often watched you. Because you took a header down that slide just now. What'll you be at next. Shall we go back to the house or will you go up with me and face the Wills-Pechell eye? It's celebrated, I warn you—got enough pluck left for that?"
And as she climbed the brushwood path—her hand in this new friend's—Fenella, all her elation gone, was wondering how much share after all her will had had in the choice just made, and whether this dazzling dream-vista of success and applause, out of which, as earnest of her right to all it promised, a rush of warm-scented air seemed to meet her through the snow-filled dusk, were not really a decree of fate, hostile and inexorable to her heart's desire as death would have seemed three months ago—peace, salty suffocation on the dark, lonely, foreign beach, clasped in her lover's arms.