"Be sarcastic if you want to," said Gracie. "If you knew anything at all, you'd know that straws show which way the wind blows. When a woman regards a man with a kind of flat, frank sincerity, it's because her heart's altogether out of his reach. When she looks around him rather than at him, it's because——" Gracie lifted her shoulders suggestively.
"Grace," breathed Wade, gravely, "I am hurt to the quick to see you developing the germs of what painfully resembles thought. For Heaven's and your sex's sake, pause while there is yet time! Women who form the pernicious habit of thinking lose in time the magic key which unlocks the hearts of men."
Grace sniffed.
"Men's hearts are never locked," she said, sagaciously. "The heavier the padlock the smoother the hinges." She shook her crisp curls as she tripped away with her airy, mincing, soubrette tread.
Notwithstanding the inconsequent nature of this talk, it set Wade to thinking. Perhaps he had carried his principle of self-effacement too far. At all events, when he next saw Miss Ruley, he went up to her and stopped for a moment's conversation.
It chanced to be on the sands. Elizabeth was sitting by herself under the arch of a lace-hung sunshade, which cast shaking little shadows on her face, sprigging it with such delicate darkness as lurk in the misty milk of moss-agate.
"You are going in, then?" she asked, smiling up rather uncertainly, and noticing his flannel attire. "Mr. Graham is already very far out. That is he, I think, taking that big breaker. What a stroke!"
Wade, focussing an indulgent eye, saw a figure away beyond the other bathers, rising to the lift of a great billow. The man swam with a splendid motion. Whether he dived, or floated, or circled his arms in that whirling stroke of his, he seemed in subtle sympathy with the sea, possessed of a kinship with it, and in an element altogether his own.
Wade expressed an appropriate sentiment of admiration.
Just then Gracie Gayle came gambolling along, a childish shape, kirtled to the knee in bright blue, and turbaned in vivid scarlet. Among the loose-waisted figures on the sands she was like a humming-bird scintillating in a staid gathering of barnyard fowls. Bailey was with her, having returned after a fortnight's absence.