'I don't think I could hit you,' said she, in a meditative tone of perfect unconsciousness as to the bewitching import of her speech.
'Don't you think you could?' I said, drawing nearer, but governing my passion.
'No,' said she, looking now for the first time with those wide-open confiding eyes which, as a child, were the chief characteristic of her face. 'I don't think I could hit you, whatever you did.'
'Couldn't you, Winifred?' I said, coming still nearer, in order to drink to the full the wonder of her beauty, the thrill at my heart bringing, as I felt, a pallor to my cheek. 'Don't you think you could hit your old playfellow, Winifred?'
'No,' she said, still gazing in the same dreamy, reminiscent way straight into my eyes as of yore. 'As a child you were so delightful. And then you were so kind to me!'
At that word 'kind' from her to me I could restrain myself no longer; I shouted with a wild laughter of uncontrollable passion as I gazed at her through tears of love and admiration and deep gratitude—gazed till I was blind. My throat throbbed till it ached: I Could get out no more words; I could only gaze. At my shout Winifred stood bewildered and confused. She did not understand a mood like that. Having got myself under control, I said,
'Winifred, it is not my doing; it is Fate's doing that we meet here on this night, and that I am driven to say here what I had as a schoolboy sworn should be said whenever we should meet again.'
'I think,' said Winifred, pulling herself up with the dignity of a queen, 'that if you have anything important to say to me it had better be at a more seasonable time than at this hour of night, and at a more seasonable place than on these sands.'
'No, Winifred,' said I, 'the time is now, and the place is here—here on this very spot where, once on a time, you said "certumly" when a little lover asked your hand. It is now and here, Winifred, that I will say what I have to say.'
'And what is that, sir?' said Winifred, much perplexed and disturbed.