The Santon sands were a rather wonderful sight that morning. The tide was at its farthest out, and some mysterious wave-action had rolled out the wide spaces, not to an even flatness, but into regular parallel striations of wet and dry, the wet so mirror-like and shining that the sky was perfectly reduplicated in it and the flight of the seabirds far under our feet could be distinctly seen, the dry portions the intervening footings from one to the next of which we stepped. Our feet left no prints on the firm surface, so that looking behind the illusion was still the same--the dry stripes, the sudden brilliant chasms in between, everywhere the interrupted inversions of blue and white and dazzling sun.
"Well, I've been having my first real talk with your Chummy," I remarked as the alternations slowly flowed under our feet.
"About his aims and so on--what he wants to do. Apparently he wants to get on some sort of an Expedition. But is it likely he'll ever fly again?"
"I don't know," she said; and walked a little way before adding, "I shouldn't think he'd want to."
She looked straight before her, as if to rest her eyes from the passing immensities underfoot. There was indeed a fantastic sort of consonance between flight and the phenomenon of the shore that midday. I do not know, however, whether this vague association prompted the huge implication of her very next words--an implication which I now had from her for the first time.
"You know what I mean," she said quietly.
I tried to steal a glance at her face, but saw only the folds of the sunbonnet.
"And that it isn't the kind of thing anybody wants to talk about," she added, leaving me to take the hint.
"No," I agreed mechanically; but for all that I needed a few moments in which to think.
Obviously I was not there to get out of Philip's wife something that Philip himself refused me; but the immensity of her quiet assumption had pulled me up short. I was assumed to know the whole--the whole--of "what she meant." It was left to my good sense to see that it was not a thing to talk about. There was to be no argument; she merely expected an equal simplicity in return, and with a woman like Mollie to expect such a thing is to get it. I watched a cloud of sheldrake that wheeled and broke over their own images a few yards away to our left, and then I turned to her.