"I don't know, though we shall probably find out soon enough. But I don't care, now that you are here."
"James, dear, will you forgive me for this afternoon?"
"I'll forgive you if you'll take it all back, hide, hoofs and horns, for ever 'n ever, amen."
Anybody could have told them that it was only a phase of feminine panic in the face of the unknown, necessary as sneezing. But, as Jim said, it didn't matter.
"Never mind. Only I don't want you to marry me because you found me here all bluggy and pitied me."
"James! To talk like that! You know it wasn't--"
"Then, what was it?" Jim, suddenly grown serpent-like in craft, turned his well-known ingenuous and innocent expression upon her.
"The moment you left me, up there in the pine grove, I knew I couldn't do without you."
Agatha, loving his teasing, but too deeply moved, too generous and sincere to play the coquette, turned to him again a face shining with tenderness. Her eyes, like stars; her lips, all sweetness.
Something rose again in Jimmy's soft heart, choking him. As he had thrilled to the unknown ecstasy in Agatha's song, many days before, so now he thrilled to her voice and face, eloquent for him alone. Love and its power, life and its meaning, the long, long thoughts of youth and hope and desire--these held him in thrall. Agatha was in his arms. Time was lost to him, and earth.
No one ever knew whether the accomplished Frenchman reached shore, ultimately, in the rowboat, or descended to Sabrina beneath the waves. If that last hasty exit from the deck of the _Sea Gull_ was also his final exit from life, certain it is that his departure into the realm of shades was unwept and unsung. The stick of dynamite was found, after a gingerly search, lying on one of the berths in the large cabin, where it had been dropped by the Frenchman in his flight.
Jimmy Hambleton did not let the shoe business entirely go to destruction, though his taste for holidays grew markedly after he brought his bride home with him to Lynn. One year, when the babies were growing up, he ordered a trim little yacht to be built and put into her berth at Charlesport. She was named the _Sea Gull_. Jimmy's chauffeur, called Hand, was her captain.
Sometimes, when James and Agatha were alone, in the zone of stillness that hung over the listening water, there would rise a song, clear and birdlike:
