Kitty, as she sometimes did, seemed to slip suddenly outside the circle of the present, of her own life and the life around her; far off she saw it, a queer little excited corner of the universe, where people played together and were happy, where the funny world spun round and round and laughed and cried and ran and slept and loved and hated, and everything mattered intensely, and yet, as seen from outside the circle, did not matter at all.... She felt like a soul unborn, or a soul long dead, watching the world's antics with a dispassionate, compassionate interest....
The touch of Chester's hand on her cheek brought her back abruptly into the circle again.
"Belovedest," he said, "let's come down the hill. The light is going."
4
One day they had a shock; they met someone they knew. They met him in the sea; at least he was in a boat and they were in the sea. They were swimming a mile from shore, in a pearl-smooth, golden sea, in the eye of the rising sun. Half a mile out from them a yacht lay, as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean. From the yacht a boat shot out, rowed by a man. It shot between the swimmers and the rising sun. Chester and Kitty were lying on their backs, churning up the sun's path of gold with their feet, and Kitty was singing a little song that Greek goat-herds sing on the hills above Corinth in the mornings.
Leaning over the side and resting on his oars, the man in the boat shouted, "Hullo, Chester!"
An electric shock stabbed Kitty through at the voice, which was Vernon Prideaux's. Losing her nerve, her head, and her sense of the suitable, she splashed round on to her chest, kicked herself forward, and dived like a porpoise, travelling as swiftly as she could from Chester, Prideaux, and the situation. When she came up it was with a splutter, because she had laughed. Glancing backwards over her shoulder, she saw Chester swimming towards the boat. What would he say? Would he speak of her, or wrap her in discreet silence? And had Prideaux recognised her or not?
"Lunatic," said Kitty. "Of course he did. I have taken the worst way, in my excitement."
Promptly she retraced her path, this time on the water's surface, and hailed Prideaux as she came.
"Hullo, Vernon. The top of the morning to you. I thought I'd show you I could dive.... What brings you here? Oh the yacht, of course...." She paused, wondering what was to be their line, then struck one out on her own account. "Isn't it odd; Mr. Chester and I are both staying near here."