Vexation silenced her; she sat restless for a few seconds, then:
"I think you had better try to endure me for a few minutes longer. I'm safer than the fog."
But his amusement left her unresponsive, plainly occupied with her own ideas.
Again the tent of vapour stretched its magic folds above the boat and around it; again the shoreward shapes faded to phantoms and disappeared.
He spoke again once or twice, but her brief replies did not encourage him. At first, he concluded that her inattention and indifference must be due to self-consciousness; then, slightly annoyed, he decided they were not. And, very gradually, he began to realise that the unconventional, always so attractive to the casual young man, did not interest her at all, even enough to be aware of it or of him.
This cool unconsciousness of self, of him, of a situation which to any wholesome masculine mind contained the germs of humour, romance, and all sorts of amusing possibilities, began to be a little irksome to him. And still her aloofness amused him, too.
"Do you know of any decorous reason why we should not talk to each other occasionally during this fog?" he asked.
She turned her head, considered him inattentively, then turned it away again.
"No," she said indifferently; "what did you desire to say?"
Resting on his oars, the unrequited smile still forlornly edging his lips, he looked at his visitor, who was staring into the fog, lost in her own reflections; and never a glimmer in her eyes, never a quiver of lid or lash betrayed any consciousness of his gaze or even of his presence. And he continued to inspect her with increasing annoyance.
The smooth skin, the vivid lips slightly upcurled, the straight delicate nose, the cheeks so smoothly rounded where the dark thick lashes swept their bloom as she looked downward at the water--all this was abstractly beautiful; very lovely, too, the full column of the neck, and the rounded arms guiltless of sunburn or tan.
So unusually white were both neck and arms that Hamil ventured to speak of it, politely, asking her if this was not her first swim that season.
Voice and question roused her from abstraction; she turned toward him, then glanced down at her unstained skin.