“Her ring’s gone,” whispered Annie, pulling down her sleeves over her soft arms, and holding out her wrists, for him to fasten the bands, “and you do belong to none but I now, Luke. When shall us be married, dear?” she added, pressing her cool cheek against his, and running her fingers through his hair.
The words, as well as the gesture that accompanied them, jarred upon Luke’s susceptibilities.
“Why is it,” he thought, “that girls are so extraordinarily stupid in these things? Why do they always seem only waiting for an opportunity to drop their piquancy and provocation, and become confident, assured, possessive, complacent? Have I,” he said to himself, “made a horrible blunder? Shall I regret this day forever, and be ready to give anything for those fatal words not to have been uttered?”
He glanced down once more upon the brimming, in-rushing tide that covered Gladys’ ring. Then with a jerk he pulled out his watch.
“Go and call the others,” he commanded, “I’m going to have a dip before we start.”
Annie glanced quickly into his face, but reassured by his friendly smile, proceeded to obey him, with only the least little sigh.
“Don’t drown yourself, dear,” she called back to him, as she made her way cautiously across the rocks.
Luke hurriedly undressed, and standing for a moment, a slim golden figure, in the horizontal sunlight, swung himself lightly down over the rock’s edge and struck out boldly for the open sea.
With vigorous strokes he wrestled with the inflowing tide. Wave after wave splashed against his face. Pieces of floating sea-weed and wisps of surf clung to his arms and hair. But he held resolutely on, breathing deep breaths of liberty and exultation, and drinking in, as if from a vast wide-brimmed cup, the thrilling spaciousness of air and sky.
Girls, love-making, marriage,—the whole complication of the cloying erotic world,—fell away from him, like the too-soft petals of some great stifling velvet-bosomed flower; and naked of desire, as he was naked of human clothes, he gave himself up to the free, pure elements. In later hours, when once more the old reiterated tune was beating time in his brain, he recalled with regret the large emancipation of that moment.