At the same instant he and Dorothy exchanged winks; and all this arguing abruptly ceased. Then we strolled into the garden, where I was urged to light my cigar. We examined the water lilies under the fountain, and the various exotic plants which Ethelwyn’s gardeners had persuaded to perfume the air. Cornelia put a sprig of heliotrope in my buttonhole, smilingly quoting a line of The Winter’s Tale about flowers for my “time of day.” Presently the children, with Father Blakewell and their Aunt Alice, returned to the court, where the mah jongg outfit had been set out in place of the dinner-table and a little fire of cedar wood had been lighted, more for its social fragrance than from any need of it. Soon we heard a pleasant chatter of “seasons” and “green dragons” and “characters.”
It was a pleasant picture, as we looked in on it through the archway. We stood there together for a moment, her shoulder just brushing my sleeve, and we seemed both to be studying the scene, like—I sentimentalized it long afterward—like a pair of happy parents fondly watching their children at play. We seemed both to be thinking of the same thing; but I know that we were not; for I myself was thinking what a wonderful chatelaine Cornelia was, and what elaborate properties she really required for the adequate staging of her part in life, and what an unutterable fool any poor professor would be who should think that, if he picked up that little exquisite body by my side, he could carry off Cornelia, and make her his own. What I loved in her, I said to myself in a kind of bittersweet paroxysm of realization, was paradoxically not in her; it was the charming world which she had the gift of creating around her; and it would require a caravan of elephants to provide her with suitable accessories for the lodging of a single night.
“And now,” said Cornelia, recalling me from my swift revery, “if you don’t mind walking so soon after dinner, I’m going to take you down to the sea—for the sunset.” She glanced at me sidewise and upward from gray eyes which deliciously feigned serious question about the words which her lips were framing: “Do you mind?”
IV
A SILENCE BY THE SEA
It is a half hour’s walk from Santo Espiritu to the sea.
As we went through the gate of the walled garden into the walnut grove, Cornelia patted my arm lightly, like a shy, affectionate, approving child, and said softly: “I’m so glad you came.”
“And I.”
“But let’s not talk about that yet. Let’s walk first. I do hope there will be a fine sunset. We have them here so seldom. This evening it looks right.”
We walked on swiftly, chatting of nothings; through the trees; a short distance along the Santo Espiritu valley road; then up a steepish path to the tufted gopher-burrowed mesa; and across it and down it through zigzags among the sagebrush and thorny gray shrubs toward the ocean, over which hung a dull gray curtain of cloud. There was nothing bright in the scene but the “bluebird gown” of Cornelia, flitting down the gray-lichened slope ahead of me. But the dull blue expanse of the sea brightened a little as we crossed a strip of level ground at the foot of the mesa and came to a stand on the edge of a long crescent-shaped bluff. I looked out at the fishing boats anchored a quarter of a mile from shore.
“Look down!” said Cornelia. “This is one of our show places. And you’d better sit down, if you are dizzy at all.”