"I wish motors had never been invented," he told himself.
All the same, when the hour-glass of time had let through the last grain of the space of their separation, and a pale girl withdrew her eyes from the speck of a boat growing smaller and smaller on a sea that sparkled so brilliantly that you could hardly look at it, and almost listlessly turned to walk back alone to her hotel, she was confronted with a very pale young man standing beside a very new motor-car.
"You!" she said, and, as once before, the blood rushed to her face, and his to his, answering.
This was the moment for which he had lived for weeks--and they shook hands like strangers! She was grave and cold. What would her first words be?
He looked like a criminal detected in a larceny.
"_I_ said Tuesday," he told her. "Do you mind?"
In his anticipations of this moment he had always counted on a mutual wave of gladness in their reunion, in which all doubts should be resolved and all explanations be easy. Now, he himself felt awkward as a school-boy. And he noted in her a quite inexplicable restraint and embarrassment, although she was certainly saying that she did not mind, and that it did not matter at all.
"Where were you going?" he asked, mechanically, just for something to say as they stood there by the motor, jostled by all the people who had been seeing other people off.
"To my hotel, to pack and to write to you, as I said I would."
"Shall I go away and wait for the letter?" he asked, feeling that tea and toast would have done well enough.
Now that the flush had died from her face he saw that it was paler and thinner. She saw in him a curious hardness. It was one of those moments when the light of life has gone out and there is nothing to be said that is not futile and nothing to be done that is of any use.
She wore a silky, soft-brown, holland-colored dress and a white hat with some black velvet about it and a dark rose. A wine-colored scarf fluttered about her, and in spite of her paleness and thinness she was more beautiful than ever and far more dear.
"Do you like the car?" he added, stupidly.
"Very much," she said, without so much as glancing at it. She looked up. "Well, what are we going to do?" she asked, almost crossly.