"Which tale?" asked Wat, promptly, as if there were only two in the world—as indeed there were, for them. Kate sighed at the impossibility of having both at once—the wondrous tale of their past, and the yet more wondrous and aureate tale of their future.
"Tell me how you first loved me, and when, and why, and how much?" she said, since perforce she had to choose one.
Then Wat, delving always further and further into the past, produced instance after instance to prove that ever since he had seen her, known her, hearkened to her voice, there had not been a moment when he had not loved her.
And Kate, resting the dusky tangle of her soft curls on his shoulder, sighed again and again with a nestling bliss to listen to tale so sweet.
"You have forgotten about what you thought coming up the stairs in Zaandpoort Street," she would correct. For she knew the track of the story-teller by heart, and like a child with a favorite fairy tale, she resented omissions almost as much as she suspected the genuineness of additions.
"Now tell me more about seeing me lying on Maisie's lap with hands clasped behind my head. And about what you thought then."
And so most innocently she would put her hands in the very position it was Wat's duty to describe, which naturally for some moments disturbed his ideas and interfered with the continuity of the history.
But as soon as they turned homeward they became, after their manner, severely practical.
"Kate," said Wat, as they walked together—Wat's hand mostly on his sweetheart's shoulder, after the manner of school-boys that are comrades—"'tis high time we were taking thought for our escape. Each day makes the coming of the ship to carry off Barra and his retinue a nearer possibility."
Kate sighed as she looked on the long barrier of the northern breakers whitening the horizon, and then at the mellow floods of peaceful light which poured in from the west, where the seabirds were circling and diving.