"To tell you the truth, I found it very awkward."
"Awkward?" he laughed.
"And exciting," she confessed.
"Shall we repeat it until you are used to it?"
"Thank you, I'm sufficiently amused for to-day," she answered, soberly. "And now we will put on our shoes and be good children."
For the rest of the journey Norman found her strangely silent. Now and then he caught her looking at him furtively out of her big brown eyes, as if she had just met him and was half afraid to go further.
He found himself particularly sensitive to her moods. The moment she became silent and thoughtful her impulses ruled his, and not a word was spoken for a mile. Scarcely two sentences passed between them until they reached the summit of the range and sat down on the cliff overhanging the sea.
This cliff was one of the numerous headlands which thrust their peaks in almost perpendicular lines sheer into the ocean.
They sat for an hour and drank in the peace and solemn grandeur of the infinite blue expanse.
"What a little world, the one in which we live down there and fret and fume," he whispered. "The one we think so big when in the thick of the fight! We forget the dim expanse of ocean kissing ocean—encircling the earth—of the skies that kiss the sea and lead on and on into those great silent deeps where a universe of worlds roll in grandeur!"