Her eyes smiled, but she said carelessly, 'That can be as you like. You are very welcome to what you have had. I will show you the way to the shore, though I dare say you would find it again by yourself.'
He endeavoured to linger, but she gave him no leisure to do so. She escorted him to the edge of the steep descent, and there bade him a decided adieu.
Loswa, with all his grace and ease and habits of the world, felt at a loss before this child. He would have kissed her hand in farewell, but her arms were folded on her chest as she stood on the rock above him, and nodded to him a good-humoured good-bye; cheerfully, indifferently, as any boy of her years might have done.
'It is easy to see that you come from Paris!' she called after him, watching his descent along the passerelle with a kindly little laugh at the hesitation of his steps.
'Let her marry Gros Louis!' he thought angrily as that clear childish laughter echoed through the sunlit air from above his head. 'I have her portrait—that is all that matters.'
What a feature of the next year's Salon would be that brilliant, bold head when it should be hung in the full light of a May day, for all Paris to gaze upon, marked 'D'après Nature,' and signed Loswa!
He soon, despite his indolent limbs, which were more used to the boulevards than the sand and the shingle, regained his boat, and pushed it in deep water.
Damaris Bérarde stood above on the brow of the cliff, amongst the olive-boughs and the great leaves of the fig-trees, looking towards that pale golden far-off shore where 'the world' was a world with other men than Raphael and Gros Louis, with other fruits than the round orange and the black olive, with other music than the tinkle of the throat-bells of the goats.