Section 4
Two people were bathing in the sea.
I had awakened. It was still that white and wonderful night, andthe blue band of clear sky was no wider than before. These peoplemust have come into sight as I fell asleep, and awakened me almostat once. They waded breast-deep in the water, emerging, comingshoreward, a woman, with her hair coiled about her head, and inpursuit of her a man, graceful figures of black and silver, with abright green surge flowing off from them, a pattering of flashingwavelets about them. He smote the water and splashed it towardher, she retaliated, and then they were knee-deep, and then for aninstant their feet broke the long silver margin of the sea.
Each wore a tightly fitting bathing dress that hid nothing of theshining, dripping beauty of their youthful forms.
She glanced over her shoulder and found him nearer than she thought,started, gesticulated, gave a little cry that pierced me to theheart, and fled up the beach obliquely toward me, running like thewind, and passed me, vanished amidst the black distorted bushes,and was gone--she and her pursuer, in a moment, over the ridge ofsand.
I heard him shout between exhaustion and laughter. . . .
And suddenly I was a thing of bestial fury, standing up with handsheld up and clenched, rigid in gesture of impotent threatening,against the sky. . . .
For this striving, swift thing of light and beauty was Nettie--andthis was the man for whom I had been betrayed!
And, it blazed upon me, I might have died there by the sheer ebbingof my will--unavenged!
In another moment I was running and stumbling, revolver in hand, inquiet unsuspected pursuit of them, through the soft and noiselesssand.