“Which reminds me that the chicken is getting cold, and the ice warm,” I suggested. “At the time, I thought there could be no place better than the farmhouse kitchen—but this is. I ordered all this for something I want to say to you—the sea, the sand, the stars.”
“How alliterative you are!” she said, trying to be flippant. “You are not to say anything until I have had my supper. Look how the things are spilled around!”
But she ate nothing, after all, and pretty soon I put the tray down in the sand. I said little; there was no hurry. We were together, and time meant nothing against that age-long wash of the sea. The air blew her hair in small damp curls against her face, and little by little the tide retreated, leaving our boat an oasis in a waste of gray sand.
“If seven maids with seven mops swept it for half a year
Do you suppose, the walrus said, that they could get it clear?”
she threw at me once when she must have known I was going to speak. I held her hand, and as long as I merely held it she let it lie warm in mine. But when I raised it to my lips, and kissed the soft, open palm, she drew it away without displeasure.
“Not that, please,” she protested, and fell to whistling softly again, her chin in her hands. “I can’t sing,” she said, to break an awkward pause, “and so, when I’m fidgety, or have something on my mind, I whistle. I hope you don’t dislike it?”
“I love it,” I asserted warmly. I did; when she pursed her lips like that I was mad to kiss them.
“I saw you—at the station,” she said, suddenly. “You—you were in a hurry to go.” I did not say anything, and after a pause she drew a long breath. “Men are queer, aren’t they?” she said, and fell to whistling again.
After a while she sat up as if she had made a resolution. “I am going to confess something,” she announced suddenly. “You said, you know, that you had ordered all this for something you—you wanted to say to me. But the fact is, I fixed it all—came here, I mean, because—I knew you would come, and I had something to tell you. It was such a miserable thing I—needed the accessories to help me out.”
“I don’t want to hear anything that distresses you to tell,” I assured her. “I didn’t come here to force your confidence, Alison. I came because I couldn’t help it.” She did not object to my use of her name.