It was Arline Champion, Sara Davenport’s oldest friend, and closest chum, who spoke, digging in the sands with the toe of her tan boot, as she darted a demure glance along a rainbow bridge of sunbeams in pursuit of a prepossessing pedestrian who had passed at the moment upon the extreme edge of the beach where the white sands gleamed through sunlit tide-ripples, like milk in a golden vase.
“Well! wherever I’ve seen him, I’ve seen him. And, what’s more, he has run across me before, too! I felt the thrill (now, which of the colors shall I daub her with next, sky-blue, white, or dark slate?) the thrill that shot from one to the other of us when he passed. ’Twas more than the mere shock of surprise--admiration--of me and my three paint-pots.”
The impressionist artist, Sara, laughed--she who was reproducing, or trying to, with many a glance at the horizon, the dazzling light and shade of this August day in great bold smears upon her small boat’s side--the magical, baffling tints of sky-blue sea, dark, shadowy wave-hollows, white noonday light--to reproduce them as she saw them.
“Why, he was almost on the point of twirling his little mustache, when he first shot a sidelong glance at me--and such a start as he gave!”--the paintress went on. “He caught himself up just in time. If one’s to judge by his dress--sportsman’s suit--he’s not of the class to be rude, exactly.”
“Pshaw! What man living mightn’t be betrayed into twirling his mustache over a camouflaged dory: a little boat all smeared--like a Merry Andrew--with sky-blue, white, and splashing dark spots? Perfect clown! He couldn’t be mortal and not be amused. I wonder he didn’t smile outright as he passed.”
It was an older girl who spoke, a girl whose clear white skin was now slightly tanned, whose dark eyes held a golden spark in their depths, lit by the thrill of her response to the blue-and-white beauty of the August day about her--a response even more elastic than that of her companions.
“Smile! Pshaw! I’d have liked it better if he had smiled. I’d have liked it better if he had--even--spoken! Now--now you needn’t get off ‘tut, tut!’ Olive, in your character of Assistant Guardian; I’ll say it for you.” Sara’s dancing flame was saucy as she rinsed her camouflaging brush in the tide, then dipped it into a dazzling pot of white paint standing beside the blue. “What I mean is that if he had spoken, or--or merely smiled a little, I might”--musingly smearing on the paint--“might have remembered, all of a sudden, where I’ve seen him before.... Now--’twill haunt----”
“Whe-ew! Fancy Sally Davenport, shadow-haunted, ghost-haunted!” Olive burst into a low laugh.
“Oh-h! We know that no ghost fazes you, not even the ghost of chlorine gas. You don’t knuckle under to it!”
The kneeling artist slapped her brush suddenly against her dory’s side, drew it vehemently across the bow in a great white, dazzling smear, then turned impulsively and gazed along the still more dazzling beach upon which the stranger had passed, her gold-tipped eyelashes twinkling, her brown eyebrows drawn together hard, as if thought were dipping a paint-brush into some camouflaging pot of memory and trying to produce a picture--trying with all its might.