Page:The little blue devil (IA littlebluedevil00mackiala).pdf/136

With one swift, adorable movement she had brushed his hands with her velvety cheek. He flushed darkly and opened them, letting hers go.

“My hands thank you, little sister,” he said, and the lightness of it was an effort. (“This would go better in English,” he thought.) “Now shall they catch some crabs, to finish the picnic?”

The dimples appeared in Liane’s cheeks. “It is so good of your hands,” she said, “but I wish they had not to hurry the picnic so. All the same—is there time to catch crabs at all? Let us hurry.”

“Over there by the rock-pool is the best place.”

As they went he thought: “It was my idiotic fancy. She’s just the same baby as she always was—a kid of sixteen—what a fatuous young idiot I am!”

And then he very gladly thought no more about it.

That afternoon when they got home old Charbonnel watched them as if he were waiting for something. He was a cautious man, who made reckless experiments at times, and at the back of his wildest venture there was always a plan. But he got nothing from “ces enfants” that day. They had been playing in the sand, that was all.

Next day Tony did not go to the Charbonnels’, but the day after that he had quite forgotten that obscure feeling of something being changed. He brought Liane a necklace of pink shells from the Gilberts, and she cooed and purred over them, and hung them round his neck to see the effect (which was a most immoral one; he looked like the god of some hitherto unknown Eastern religion, delighting in murder for the humour of it); she gave them to her two kittens to play with, and snatched them away just as the kittens were about to enjoy themselves thoroughly, and finally she put them round her bare brown throat, slipping the end of the chain underneath her dress.