XVII
After a silence, she lay back among her cushions and glanced at us with a faint smile.
"One day last winter," she said, "after the last client had gone and office hours were over, I sat here thinking, wondering what in the world could be worse for a girl than to have no parents.... And I happened to glance into my crystal, and saw there an incident beginning to evolve that cheered me up, because it was a parody on my more morbid train of thought. After all, the same Chance that gives a child to its parents gives the parents to that child. You may think this is Tupper," she added, "but it is Athalie. And that being the case, nobody will laugh."[152]
Nobody did laugh.
"Thank you," she said sweetly. "Now I will tell you what I saw in my crystal when I happened to be feeling unusually alone in the world." And with a pretty nod to us, collectively, she began.
The bulk of the cargo and a few bodies were coming ashore at the eastern end of the island, and that is where the throngs were—people from the Light House, fishermen from the inlet, and hundreds of winter tourists from St. Augustine, in white flannels and summer gowns, all attracted to Ibis Island by the grewsome spectacle of the wreck.
The West Indian hurricane had done its terrific business and had gone, leaving a turquoise sky untroubled by a cloud, and a sea of snow and cobalt.
Nothing living had been washed ashore from the wreck. As for the brig, she had vanished—if there had been anything left of her to disappear except the wreckage, human and otherwise, that had come tumbling ashore through the surf all night long.
So young Gray, seeing that there was nothing[153] for him to do, and not caring for the spectacle at the eastern end of the island, turned on his heel and walked west through thickets of sweet bay, palmetto, and beach-grape.