“Ob wha’ you t’inking?”
“Nothin’,” she sighed, contemplating laconically a little transparent shell of violet pearl, full of sea-water and grains of sand, that the wind ruffled as it blew.
“Not ob any sort ob lil t’ing?” he caressingly insisted, breaking an open dark flower from her belt of wild Pansy.
“I should be gwine home,” she breathed, recollecting the undoing of the negress Ottalie.
“Oh, I dat amorous ob you, Mimi.”
“If you want to finish dat net, while de daylight last.”
For oceanward, in a glowing ball, the sun had dropped already.
“Sho’, nigger, I only wish to be kind,” she murmured, getting up and sauntering a few paces along the strand.
Lured, perhaps, by the nocturnal phosphorescence from its lair, a water-scorpion, disquieted at her approach, turned and vanished amid the sheltering cover of the rocks. “Isht, isht,” she squealed, wading after it into the surf; but to find it, look as she would, was impossible. Dark, curious and anxious, in the fast failing light, the sea disquieted her too, and it was consoling to hear close behind her the solicitous voice of Bamboo.
“Us had best soon be movin’, befo’ de murk ob night.”