Then she rose
slowly and stood waiting for him. He came up to her without a word, and
seized both her hands, devouring her face with his eyes. Something he
saw there repelled him. Slowly he let her hands fall, still looking
at her silently. "You are not glad to see me, and I have counted the
hours," he said, at last, in a dull, toneless voice.
Her lips quivered. "Don't be angry with me--I can't help it--I'm not
glad or sorry for anything now," she answered; and her voice matched his
for grayness.
They sat down together on a long flat stone half embedded in a wiry
clump of whortleberries. Behind them the lonely hillsides rose,
brilliant with yellow bracken and the purple of heather. Before them
stretched the wide sea. It was a soft, gray day. Streaks of pale
sunlight trembled at moments far out on the water. The tide was rising
in the little bay above which they sat, and Broomhurst watched the lazy
foam-edged waves slipping over the uncovered rocks toward the shore,
then sliding back as though for very weariness they despaired of
reaching it. The muffled, pulsing sound of the sea filled the silence.
Broomhurst thought suddenly of hot Eastern sunshine, of the whir of
insect wings on the still air, and the creaking of a wheel in the
distance.
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