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Updated: June 5, 2025
As May and Geof came up the path, Kenwick, who was sitting in the stone chair which is accredited to the ancient Attila, observed the look of slowly subsiding emotion in the young girl's face, and a sudden pang seized him, whether of friendly concern or of selfish annoyance, he would have been the last to inquire.
Her amusingly irrational attitude gave rise to some lively sparring between herself and Kenwick, who was at even more pains than usual to monopolise her attention, both then and afterwards.
For Oliver Kenwick was experiencing something as closely resembling genuine feeling as was like to befall him in the course of his discreetly regulated career. He had played with fire once too often, and he had discovered, not without a slight accession of self-respect, that he was perceptibly scorched. He had supposed his interest in May Beverly to be purely impersonal; he had been mistaken.
The man who values his illusions soon learns the best way of preserving them, and the illusion in question was doubly valuable, since it bade fair, under judicious tending, to invest the mythical Oliver Kenwick, already so dear to his imagination, with a nimbus of romantic devotion most agreeable to contemplate.
Pauline begged, mindful of her little air-castle; for the Colonel always managed, when he could, to get Geoffry into his own boat, and the young man was already engaged in an animated conversation with her sister. "Do come," said Mrs. Daymond. "And Mr. Kenwick, I shall have to give you up, for I can't spare an oar." "Doesn't Mr. Kenwick row?" asked May, lifting a pair of satirical eye-brows.
"I ought to be willing to dance in my tennis dress the rest of my days," she told herself; "for the sake of changing the whole course of a poor man's life!" "Lungo!" The familiar call took her quite by surprise, and looking out from under the awning, she espied the Daymond sea-horse on its blue ground, already close upon them. Geof was at the oar and Kenwick was sitting beside Mrs. Daymond.
Under the awning, on the very rusty and dilapidated cushions, sat Kenwick, and beside him, face up, was an oil-sketch of a half-grown boy, sitting at the prow of a fishing-boat, dangling his bare brown legs over the water, which gave back a broken reflection of the bony members.
As Kenwick stood, the next morning, on the deck of the beautiful pleasure-boat for whose splendours he had betrayed so lively an appreciation, he looked back across the widening distance with a sense of regret more poignant than he was at all prepared to deal with.
An indefinable shadow crept over the bright elation of a moment previous, and she stopped painting. "That old tub of your Nanni's is about ready for the crematory," Kenwick observed, as he too began putting up his traps. "The crematory?" she repeated, absently. "Yes; when they are fairly on their last legs the gondolas are burnt in the glass-factories."
The men were resting on their oars, while the passengers stood up to survey the view beyond the jetty. "You didn't come out far enough to get the swell," said Pauline. "Yes, we did," May answered. "But we didn't like it; so we came back." "Miss May was pretty badly frightened," Kenwick observed, with his most brilliant smile. "Nonsense!" cried May; "I was no more frightened than anybody else!
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