"He threatened me," said Ted plaintively, "in a loud, angry voice, with 'My name is Massingbird,' and all the rest of it. I told him that to telegraph meant there was a reason for telegraphing, and he had none. Besides, we did not want Jack. He was not part of the plan."
"Jack's nose has grown since he became a financier," remarked Kit. "That is the worst of becoming anything. If you become a pianist, your hair grows. If you become a philanthropist, your front-teeth grow. I never intend to become anything, not even a good woman," she said with emphasis.
"Oh, how I hate people who are in earnest about things!" said Kit in a sort of frenzy. "I mean I hate people being in earnest about the things they ought to be in earnest about. One should only take seriously things like one's hair and games and dress. For sheer social hopelessness give me a politician or a divine. Ted, promise me you will never become a divine."
"Not to-day, at any rate," said Ted; "but I shall keep it as a hold over you."
"I've finished for what I have received," she said, "and so we'll go out. Have you got a spade for me to dig in the sand with as I wade? Oh, there's the bezique-box. I think we'll play bezique instead. Is there a _café_ or anything of the sort, where there will be a band. Bezique goes so well to a Strauss valse."
"There is a draper's shop and a church," said Ted. "That is all."
But after a couple of games the splendour of the evening weaned them from their cards. It had been a very hot day, but not long before sunset a cool wind was borne out of the sea, and they strolled out. Sunset was imminent in the west, and the land enmeshed in a web of gold. High in the zenith floated a few flushed feathers of cloud, and the sea was level and waveless--a polished surface of reflected brightness. The tide was on the ebb, and the smooth sand, wet from its retreat, was a mirror of the sky, a strip framed in the sea, and the high-water mark. Southward the land trended away in headland behind folded headland to an infinite distance of hazy and conjectured distances. The unbreathed air, a traveller over a hundred horizons of sea, was cool and tonic, and the whisper of the ripples crisp within the ear. And Kit with her childlike impressionableness, which was at once her danger and her charm, caught surely at the spirit of the free large spaces. She had taken off her hat, and walked firm and lithe along the shining ripple-fringed beaches, each footstep crushing for a moment the moisture out of the sand in a circle round her tread, and breathing deep, with open mouth, of the vivifying air. Like a chameleon she took instinctively the colour of her surroundings, and just now she was steeped in open air, freedom, and the great plains of sea and sky. She always gulped things down, camels and needles alike, thirsty of full sensations.