Still stroking Pia's hand, Trix spoke slowly.
"Pia, darling, what I am going to say will sound very poor comfort, I know. But it's this. Isn't it just possible that you could give the--the person concerned the benefit of a doubt? Even if it seems to you that he has acted a lie, and therefore been something of a fraud, mayn't there be some extraordinarily good reason, behind it all, that circumstances are preventing him from explaining? Such queer things do happen, and sometimes people have to appear to others as frauds, when they really aren't a bit. If you were ever really friends with the person--and you must have been, or you wouldn't care--I'd just say to myself that I would trust him in spite of every appearance to the contrary. Perhaps some day you'll be most awfully sorry if you don't. And isn't it a million times better to be even mistaken in trust where a friend is concerned, than give way to the smallest doubt which may afterwards be proved to be a wrong doubt?"
Pia was silent. Then she said in an oddly even voice,
Trix flushed to the roots of her hair. Pia turned to look at her.
"Pia," implored Trix, "you mustn't ask me a single question, because I can't answer you. But do, do, trust."
"Trix, you're the uncanniest little mortal that ever lived, and I can't imagine how you could have guessed, or what exactly it is you really do know. But I believe I am going to take your advice."
Antony was working in his front garden. It was a Saturday afternoon, and a blazingly hot one. Every now and then he paused to lean on his spade, and look out to where the blue sea lay shining and glistening in the sunlight.
It was amazingly blue, almost as blue as the sea depicted on the posters of famous seaside resorts, posters in which a bare-legged child with a bucket and spade, and the widest of wide smiles is invariably seen in the foreground. Certainly the designers of these posters are not students of child nature. If they were, they would know that a really absorbed and happy child is almost portentously solemn. It hasn't the time to waste on smiles; the building of sand castles and fortresses is infinitely too engrossing an occupation. A smile will greet the anticipation; it is lost in the stupendous joy of the fact. But as smiles are evidently considered _de rigueur_ by the designers of posters, and as the mere anticipation will not allow of the portrayal of the Rickett's blue sea, destined to hit the eye of the beholder, smiles and sea have--rightly or wrongly--to be combined.