“In what way, Mr. Merrington?”
“In the way of my devotion?”
She hesitated, not daring to take him seriously. He still held her hands, and the depth of the water at its smoothest was up to her neck as they stood.
“We must look like a pair of jumping-jacks from the shore,” she said, with a swift remembrance of his deserved punishment at her hands, and of their present position. His strong muscles never seemed to tire of lifting her to each succeeding billow. She hardly knew how her reticence had slipped from her, but now, at the risk of being bowled over by a wave, she released her hands from his. He turned back with her.
“Do not let me take you in,” she said, politely formal. “You have had no swim at all.”
“There is always the ocean,” he replied.
III.
It was easier for Jacqueline to assure herself that she would discourage Merrington’s obvious attentions than it was in fact possible for her to do so. With every meeting she was finding it harder to hold her own against him.
It was his imperturbable good nature that defeated her. If she could have provoked him to anger or even to moodiness, she would have found it easier to forgive his original offense. Moreover, underlying all of the determined deference of his bearing to her, there was that which brought an undefined thrill of fear, that touch of primitive mastery in his wooing with which a man of strong virility may yet transfuse his personality through the pallid conventions of the centuries. It was but a small consolation that she could still deny him the invitation to call upon her at her father’s house, without which even so frequent an intercourse as theirs had become remained but a street acquaintance.
Things had reached this pass when, one Saturday afternoon, Jacqueline found herself threading her way among the crowds that packed the station awaiting the incoming trains from New York, bringing their loads of week-end guests. As she wedged her way to the front, a little bewildered by the jam, she espied Merrington’s broad shoulders at the outermost edge of the crowd. At the same instant he saw her, and in a moment was beside her.