"Alice!" Eve returned. "I wish that I knew!"
Alice Carbonnel was in Belgium, the last we knew, and Harrison Rindge, her husband, was hunting for her. I hope he has found her—safe. We are very fond of Alice Carbonnel, Eve and I.
"There is somebody else to come, Adam," said Eve. "You would never guess. It is my mother."
I smiled, remembering another day when I had met Eve just at that spot to take her to another clambake; a smoking dome upon a point, beneath a pine.
The point and the pine belonged to a queer fellow that I knew—knew well, I thought sometimes, and sometimes not.
And so I smiled, remembering. "Eve," I said, "do governesses have mothers?"
And she smiled too, and she slipped her hand within my arm, and looked up at me with that light in her eyes that makes them pass all wonders.
"Oh, Adam," she said, "that was a happy day—for me. Oh, but it was hard, and I was afraid."
"A happier day for me," I said, pressing her arm close to my side. "But here comes your mother."
And Mrs. Goodwin came sailing down the path, with our little daughter skipping beside her, and she smiled as she came, which was not what she had been used to do in that time that I remembered. And our company being all assembled, and the beds being uncovered, although the tide was not yet at its lowest, I gave the order to dig. So we dug, even Mrs. Goodwin digging three clams, and she was not clad as a clammer should be clad, but she had some rubber boots, new ones and thin as gossamer, which a clamshell cut through. And thereafter she sat upon the bank and cheered us on, and gibed at our raiment; as if the body were not more than raiment.