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This girl seemed only a part of the shore, as much as sea or sand. The sun warmed, the air blew on her as on them: if they gave her anything besides, she too kept their secret. Occasionally Neckart roused himself to talk briefly to her, and noticed then a blunt directness in her speech that would have appalled an ordinary hearer.
A famine in India or an insurrection in Turkey were not mere newspaper items to him, but significant movements of the outer levers and pulleys of the great machine, part of which he was. It is the straining horse that is always loaded, and there was no man in the party from whom such work was exacted as from Neckart.
The captain took his cigar out of his mouth and turned blankly on him: "'Further your ends? But, Bruce? Neckart laughed: "Oh, no doubt they were created with some other object in view than to serve my purposes. But that is the cognizance which I take of them.
She rose and took his arm. Mr. Neckart took leave of them under the flaring lamps outside. "You have left all the life and color of your face down in the salt air, Miss Swendon," he said. "You will not mark this holiday with a white stone, I fear." "No," she said, waiting until he was gone before she spoke again. "We shall go to Cousin Will's now, father. I wish to say good-night to him."
Neither of them will ever stay under a roof if they can help it. They ought to have a dash of Indian blood in their veins to account for such vagabondizing." "Is Bruce Neckart here?" with a change in her tone which made the captain look up at her involuntarily. "Yes." "I thought he was in Washington: I did not expect to meet him." The judge puffed uneasily at his cigar.
For Neckart, with the majority of men, regarded amiability and high-colored, beefy good looks in his own sex as the irresistible attractions in a woman's eyes. "They both have youth and personal attractions and culture everything to make a marriage suitable. I can find no objection to it," proceeded his most reasonable meditation. "But I can never see it!"
The dog nuzzled his head into her hand and marched steadily beside her. Then she took Neckart and Bruno over a little hill to a spring-house, into which you went through a mossy door across a sparkling little brook.
In her agony of pity she held his hand to her wet, burning cheeks. "Jane, you drive me mad!" stooping over her trembling. "It is you you that I dare not marry!" She stood erect: "I marry you? I never thought of that," simply. "You never thought of it?" with a queer uncertain laugh. "You never thought that I loved you?" "That you loved me, Mr. Neckart? Me?"
The blue innocent eyes that had been fixed on his suddenly filled with light; she dropped her face into her hands; her whole body burned with blushes, and she turned away. Neckart slowly followed her. Jane's thoughts were always transparent as crystal: he had read in that one brief glance all the delight, the tender passion, whose first impulse was to escape from him.
Then she turned into the woods and sat down on a fallen log. It was the place where they had stopped to rest yesterday, Neckart lying at her feet. There was the imprint still in the dead moss where his arm had lain. She looked guiltily about, and then laid her hand in the broken moss with a quick passionate touch. The baby caught her chin in its fingers.
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