After the dinner all three walked out into the pines, Pats leaning on the lady’s arm. The day was warm. But the gentle, southerly breeze came full of life across the Gulf. And the water itself, this day, was the same deep, vivid blue as the water that lies between Naples and Vesuvius. The convalescent and his nurse stopped once or twice to drink in the air–and the scene.
Pats filled his lungs with a long, deep breath. “I feel very light. Hold me fast, or I may float away.”
Both his head and his legs seemed flighty and precarious. Those two glasses of claret were proving a little too much–they had set his brain a-dancing. But this he kept to himself. 120She noticed the high spirits, but supposed them merely an invalid’s delight in getting out of doors.
Under the big trees they rested for a time, in silence, Elinor gazing out across the point, over the glistening sea beyond. The shade of the pines they found refreshing. The convalescent lay at full length, upon his back, looking up with drowsy eyes into the cool, dark canopy, high above. Soothing to the senses was the sighing of the wind among the branches.
“This is good!” he murmured. “I could stay here forever.”
“That may be your fate,” and her eyes moved sadly over the distant, sailless sea. “It is a month to-day that we have been here.”
“So it is, a whole month!”
Elinor sighed. “There is something wrong, somewhere. It seems to me the natural–the only thing–would be for somebody to hunt us up.”
“Certainly.”
“Could they have sailed by this bay and missed us?”