Mary's eyes were wide now with excitement. The hours were too marvelous to be lost in sleep. She could sleep when they must return to the tiresome world with its endless crowds of people.
She rose softly, ran barefoot to the beach, threw her night-dress on the sand and plunged, her white, young body trembling with joy, into the water.
It was marvelous—this wonderful hush of the dawn over the infinite sea. The air and water melted into a pearl gray. Far out toward the east, the waters began to blush at the kiss of the coming sun. The pearl gray slowly turned into purple. So startling was the vision, she swam in-shore and stood knee-deep in the shallows to watch the magic changes. In breathless wonder she saw the sea and sky and shore turn into a trembling cloud of dazzling purple. A moment before, she had caught the water up in her hand and poured it out in a stream of pearls. She lifted a handful and poured it out now, each drop a dazzling amethyst. And even while she looked, the purple was changing to scarlet—the amethyst into rubies!
A great awe filled her in the solemn hush. She stood in Nature's vast cathedral, close to God's heart—her life in harmony with His eternal laws.
How foolish and artificial were the ways of the far-away, drab, prosaic world of clothes and houses and furnishings! If she could only live forever in this dream-world!
Even while the thought surged through her heart, she lifted her head and saw the red rim of the sun suddenly break through the sea, and started lest the white light of day had revealed her to some passing boatman hurrying to his nets.
Her keen eye quickly swept the circle of the wide, silent world of sand-dunes, marsh and waters. No prying eye was near. Only the morning star still gleaming above saw. And they were twin sisters.
Four days flew on velvet wings before the first cloud threw its shadow across her life. Jim always slept until nine o'clock, and refused with dogged good-natured indifference to stir when she had asked him to get the wood for breakfast. It was nothing, of course, to walk a hundred yards to the beach and pick up the wood, and she did it. The hurt that stung was the feeling that he was growing indifferent.
She felt for the first time an impulse to box his lazy jaws as he yawned and turned over for the dozenth time without rising. He looked for all the world like a bulldog curled up on his bed of grass.
She shook him at last.