Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/166

said, taking his hand. "I want to look at this. The sea always pulls me—God knows why—I ought to hate it, really——"

They mounted the sloping bank, rounded the corner of a line of bath-houses, and emerged onto the incomparable loneliness of a summer resort in mid-winter. A long crescent of pale sand, bordered by cottages, green ones, brown ones, with singular names on shingles over their worn front steps. Bide-a-Wee, Happy Days, Sans Souci—names like that. Windows boarded up, or showing yellowing newspapers behind the panes. Porch railings where, in season, bathing suits flapped perpetually and young folk sat and swung their bare tan legs—deserted now. There was something pathetic, ineffably forlorn, about those cottages squatting in the February sun. . . . "They look so broken-hearted," Yvonne said. . . And before the cottages, sea, that wallowed sluggishly as a summer sea, and whined, and crept in lace-edged scallops up the beach

The two walked along in silence, through sand that hugged their feet caressingly. And they came at length to a cottage called Paradise and there with one accord they stopped, smiling at one another. Yvonne sank down on the steps and took off and emptied her diminutive buckled slippers. Then she stood up. "I'm going to tell you now—my very dear. But kiss me once, first, before I do——"

Her lips had never pressed harder against his, A sort of a desperate frenzy beat in their pressure. Jock thrilled to them, the while, curiously, he was reminded of a person about to do a difficult and dangerous thing, who drank deep for artificial courage.

She detached herself and sat down again, on the top step. And Jock, a little shaken, seated himself oppo-