A light clatter of stones on the breakwater above his head roused him from his reverie. Looking up, he saw a white figure hurrying silently along. “Good-morning,” he called, with a wild hope that his thoughts had translated themselves into the wild, living embodiment. There was no answer. “Miss May, is that you?” he called again.
There was a moment’s pause, then Elfrida’s face, white and severe, appeared over the stone coping. “I didn’t intend that you should hear me pass,” she said, frowning. “It was these hateful old stones that gave me away.”
Glyn’s heart contracted. Was his presence so disagreeable to her, then, that she chid the very stones that betrayed her presence to him? Then concern for his own pain was lost in sudden concern for the unsteadiness of her position.
“Take care, please! Those stones are loose where you are standing, I can see from below here.”
She smiled willfully. “Thank you, Mr. Glyn, I am quite secure. You see, this breakwater is a friend of mine. It would never go back on me.”
In her words, as in her smile, Glyn found an echo of that laughter with which earlier in the day she had greeted Martin’s story of his narrow encounter with death. “Yes,” he replied, with a bitter sinking of the heart, “I did make rather an ass of myself last night, didn’t I?”
She laughed abruptly, but made no reply. Glyn stood looking up at her as she stood on the barrier of loose stones above his head—shading her eyes with the book that she held in her hand, looking out over the sea. A sense of his own helplessness rocked Glyn’s soul in a sudden rage. He wanted her, oh, he wanted her, as she stood there, cold and immovable, defended at every point by her own scornful ignorance of common human emotion, unassailed even by the twin lords of mankind, Love and Death, which had so newly brushed closely past her.
Suddenly she started and turned to meet his gaze with half-startled, inscrutable eyes. “The tide is on the turn,” she said, in a quick-breathed undertone—then the stone under her foot slipped and settled, she flung out her arms to steady herself, and barely recovered her balance as she swayed for an instant on the edge of the rough stone parapet. In wild anxiety Glyn sprang forward, heedless of her book, which fell fluttering past his head.
“Take care!” he cried. “Take care!”
She smiled down at him, her lips a little white, but otherwise perfectly composed. “It’s too bad,” she said. “From the first day I met you, I am always frightening you to death, Mr. Glyn.”