She passed it over with a smile. Alexis rose to his feet, tore the envelope open, and moving a few yards away towards the surf read the message. Then slowly he tore it up into the tiniest fragments and scattered them on the last wavelets of the ebb tide, and stood for a second or two, staring across the sea. At last he turned. Olivia rose to meet him. Myra was impassively making her way back up the rough slope.
“What’s the matter?” asked Olivia, puzzled at his scrupulous destruction of the telegram and reading something like fear in his eyes.
“I’ve had bad news,” he said. He picked up his bath-gown, shook it free from sand, and huddled it around him. “Let us get up to the house.” He shivered. “It’s cold.”
She followed him wonderingly.
“What bad news?” she asked.
He turned his head, with a half-laugh. “Nothing so very desperate. The end of the world hasn’t come yet. I’ll tell you when I’ve changed.”
He rushed up the steps of the veranda and into his little dressing-room. Olivia, dry and warm, sat in a sun-beat chair and anxiously waited for him. The instinct of a loving woman, the delicacy of a sensitive soul, forbade her teasing with insistent questions a man thrown for the moment off his balance. Yet she swept the horizon of her mind for reasons.
A quarter of an hour afterwards—it had seemed a quarter of a century—he appeared, dressed, not in his customary flannels, but in the blue serge suit of their wedding day. The sight of it struck a chill through her heart.
“You are going away?”
He nodded. “Yes, my dear, I have to.”