She held out her arm towards him as she spoke, and with her other hand pushed back her hair from her forehead. For so soft and tender a creature as the girl was, it was strange, the wild Maenad-like look, which she wore at that moment. She might have been an incarnation of the avenging deities of sea and air, threatening disaster to some unwitting Olympian.
Luke scrambled to his feet, and seizing her wrist with both his hands, forced her fingers apart, and possessed himself of the equivocal trinket.
“If I throw it,” he cried, in an excited tone, “will you be my wife, Annie?”
At this unexpected word a complete collapse overtook the girl. All trace of colour left her cheeks and a sudden trembling passed through her limbs. She staggered, and would have fallen, if Luke had not seized her in his arms.
In the shock of saving her, the stone-carver’s hand involuntarily unclosed, and the piece of gold, slipping from his fingers, fell down upon the slope of the rock, and sliding over its edge, sank into the deep water.
“Annie! Annie! What is it, dear?” murmured Luke, making the trembling girl sit down by his side, and supporting her tenderly.
For her only answer she flung her arms round his neck and kissed him passionately again and again. It was not only of kisses that Luke became conscious, for, as she pressed him to her, her breast heaved pitifully under her print frock, and when she let him go, the taste of her tears was in his mouth. For the first time in his life the queer wish entered the stone-carver’s mind that he had not, in his day, made love quite so often.
There was something so pure, so confiding, and yet so passionately tender, about little Annie’s abandonment, that it produced, in the epicurean youth’s soul, a most quaint sense of shame and embarrassment. It was deliciously sweet to him, all the same, to find how, beyond expectation, he had made so shrewd a choice. But he wished some humorous demon at the back of his mind wouldn’t call up before him at that moment the memory of other clinging arms and lips.
With an inward grin of sardonic commentary upon his melting mood, the cynical thought passed through his mind, how strange it was, in this mortal world, that human kisses should all so lamentably resemble one another, and that human tears should all leave behind them the same salt taste! Life was indeed a matter of “eternal recurrence,” and whether with Portland and its war-ships as the background, or with Nevilton Mount and its shady woods, the same emotions and the same reactions must needs come and go, with the same inexorable monotony!
He glanced down furtively into the foam-flecked water, but there was no sign of the lost ring. The tide seemed to have turned now, and the sea appeared less calm. Little flukes of white spray surged up intermittently on the in-rolling waves, and a strong breath of wind, rising with the sinking of the sun, blew cool and fresh upon their foreheads.