She turned back with me to the water-mark to see the waves come tumbling in beneath the moon. We sauntered along the sea-margin again, heedless of the passage of time.
And again (as on that betrothal night) Winifred prattled on, while I listened to the prattle, craftily throwing in a word or two, now and then, to direct the course of the sweet music into such channels as best pleased my lordly whim,—when suddenly, against my will and reason, there came into my mind that idea of the sea's prophecy which was so familiar to my childhood, but which my studies had now made me despise.
The sea then threw up to Winifred's feet a piece of seaweed. It was a long band of common weed, that would in the sunlight have shone a bright red. And at that very moment—right across the sparkling bar the moon had laid over the sea—there passed, without any cloud to cast it, a shadow. And my father's description of his love-tragedy haunted me, I knew not why. And right across my life, dividing it in twain like a burn-scar, came and lay for ever that strip of red seaweed. Why did my father's description of his own love-tragedy haunt me?
Before recalling the words that had fallen from my father in Switzerland, I was a boy: in a few minutes afterwards, I was a man with an awful knowledge of Destiny in my eyes—a man struggling with calamity, and fainting in the grip of dread. My manhood, I say, dates from the throwing up of that strip of seaweed. Winifred picked up the weed and made a necklace of it, in the old childish way, knowing how much it would please me.
'Isn't it a lovely colour?' she said, as it glistened in the moonlight. 'Isn't it just as beautiful and just as precious as if it were really made of the jewels it seems to rival?'
'It is as red as the reddest ruby,' I replied, putting out my hand and grasping the slippery substance.
'Would you believe,' said Winnie, 'that I never saw a ruby in my life? And now I particularly want to know all about rubies.'
'Why do you want particularly to know?'
'Because,' said Winifred, 'my father, when he wished me to come out for a walk, had been talking a great deal about rubies.'
'Your father had been talking about rubies, Winifred—how very odd!'