With a new hope, he pleaded with her to speak to him, if only once, to cry out. Had he not said she would, one day? Yes, yes, one little cry of love, to show that she was not so voiceless as people said.—
He stood with awful expectation, a thick hand bending the lobe of his ear forward. Then through silver silences a muttering was borne to him, a great lingering roar made and augmented by a million little whispers.—The Old Roke himself, taking toll at the edge of his dominions.
Nothing could approach the lonely terror of that utterance. He ran forward and threw himself on his knees at the very brink of that cracked and mauled sea cliff.
It was true that Peter, in his absence, had disembarked a second time on Meteor—a fit habitation for such a woman as Day Rackby. But did that old madman think that he could coop her up here forever? How far must he be taken seriously in his threat?
Peter advanced gingerly. Blue water heaved eternally all round that craggy island, clucked and jabbered in long corridors of faulted stone, while in its lacy edge winked and sparkled new shells of peacock blue, coming from the infinite treasury of the sea to join those already on deposit here.
What, then, was he about? He loved her. What was love? What, in this case, but an early and late sweetness, a wordless gift, a silent form floating soft by his side—something seeking and not saying, hoping and not proving, burning and as yet scarce daring—and so, perhaps, dying.
Then he saw her.
She lay in an angle of the cover, habited in that swimming suit she had plagued Jethro into buying, for she could swim like a dog. There, for minutes or hours, she had lain prone upon the sands, nostrils wide, legs and arms covered with grains of sand in black and gold glints. Staring at the transfigured flesh, she delighted in this conversion of herself into a beautiful monster.—
Suddenly the sea spoke in her blood, as the gossips had long prophesied, or something very like it. Lying with her golden head in her arms, the splendid shoulders lax, she felt a strong impulse toward the water shoot through her form from head to heel at this wet contact with the naked earth. She felt that she could vanish in the tide and swim forever.
At that moment she heard Peter's step, and sprang to her feet. She could not be mistaken. Marvelous man, in whose arms she had lain; fatal trespasser, whom her father had sworn to kill for some vileness in his nature. What could that be? Surely, there was no other man like Peter. She interpreted his motions no less eagerly than his lips.