“Saying that, child!” cried the woman. “What’s comin’ over you at all, girsha? Never let me hear of you writing to that woman!”
Norah went to the door and looked at the calm sea stretching out far below. The waves were bright under the glance of the sun; a dark boat, a little speck in the distance, was moving out towards the bar.
“Where are you going, Norah?” asked the woman at the fire.
“Down to the sea, mother,” answered the girl as she made her way towards the beach.
II
BETWEEN the ragged rocks the grass was soft to the feet and refreshing to the eyes. Two lone sycamore trees showed green against the sky; a few stray leaves, shrivelled and filed through by caterpillars, were fluttering to the earth. A long fairy-thimble stalk, partly despoiled by some heedless child but still bearing three beautiful bells at the extreme top, whipped backwards and forwards in the wind, and Norah, reaching forward, pulled off one of the flowers and pinned it to her breast.
The tide was on the turn. The girl sat on a rock by the shore and put her small brown feet in the water. Down under the moving waves they looked as if they didn’t belong to her at all. Here it was very quiet; the universal silence magnified the tranquillity of things. Under the girl’s feet it was very deep, very dark, and very peaceful; there, where a reflected swallow swept through a wide expanse of mirrored blue, in the sea under her, were no regrets, no heart-sickness, and no sorrow. When the tide went out a fair young body, a white face with closed eyes would lie on the strand. Then the Frosses people would know why the terrible phantom, Death, was courted by a girl.
“It was all a great mistake,” she said to herself, and in the excitement caused by the stress of thought she sank her nails into her palms. The memory of a night passed seven months before came vividly to her mind. How many tearful nights had gone by since then! How many times had she written to Alec Morrison telling him of her plight! No answer had come; the man was indifferent.
“I wasn’t the girl for the likes of him, anyway,” said Norah, looking at her feet in the water. “But why has all this happened to me?”
As in all great crises of a person’s life, there came a moment of vivid consciousness to Norah and every surrounding object stamped itself indelibly on her mind. The tide was sweeping slowly out; the seaweed in the pool beneath swayed like the hair of a dead body floating in the water. Two little fish with wide-open eyes looked up and seemed to be staring at her. Beneath in the water the fleecy clouds looked like little white spots against the blue of the mirrored sky, and the bar moaned loudly on the frontier of the deep sea.