“It was the period, too. I always tell her that she belongs among the later eighteen sixties. But she insists that she wasn’t even born then. Marion is tremendously single-minded.”
“She has her mind all on you.”
He looked askance at me. “You’ve noticed--”
“I’ve noticed that your mind is all on her.”
“Not half as much!” he protested, fervidly. “I don’t think it’s good for her, though of course I like it. That is, in a way. Sometimes it’s rather too--” He suddenly flung his brush from him, and started up, with a loudly shouted, “Yes, yes! I’m coming,” and hurled himself out of the garret which he used for his studio, and cleared the stairs with two bounds.
By the time I reached the outer door of the cottage, he was a dark blur in the white blur of the fog which had swallowed up the cove, and was rising round the house-walls from the grass. I heard him shouting, “Marion!” and a faint mellow answer, far out in the cove, “Hello!” and then--
“Where are you?” and her answer “Here!” I heard him jump into a boat, and the thump of the oars in the row-locks, and then the rapid beat of the oars while he shouted, “Keep calling!” and she answered,--
“I will!” and called “Hello! Hello! Hello!”
I made my mental comment that this time their mystical means of communication was somehow not working. But after her last hello, no sound broke the white silence of the fog except the throb of Alderling’s oars. She was evidently resting on hers, lest she should baffle his attempts to find her by trying to find him.
I suppose ten minutes or so had passed, when the dense air brought me the sound of low laughing that was also like the sound of low sobbing, and then I knew that they had met somewhere in the blind space. I began to hear rowing again, but only as of one boat, and suddenly out of the mist, almost at my feet, Alderling’s boat shot up on the shelving beach, and his wife leaped ashore from it, and ran past me up the lawn, while he pulled her boat out on the gravel. She must have been trailing it from the stern of his.