She threw back her head and laughed again, joyously, this time.
“Oh, it’s so ridiculous,” she said, “and you have never seen me when I was not eating! It’s too prosaic!”
“Which reminds me that the chicken is getting cold, and the ice warm,” I suggested. “At the time, I thought there could be no place better than the farmhouse kitchen - but this is. I ordered all this for something I want to say to you - the sea, the sand, the stars.”
“How alliterative you are!” she said, trying to be flippant. “You are not to say anything until I have had my supper. Look how the things are spilled around!”
But she ate nothing, after all, and pretty soon I put the tray down in the sand. I said little; there was no hurry. We were together, and time meant nothing against that age-long wash of the sea. The air blew her hair in small damp curls against her face, and little by little the tide retreated, leaving our boat an oasis in a waste of gray sand.
“If seven maids with seven mops swept it for half a year Do you suppose, the walrus said, that they could get it clear?”
she threw at me once when she must have known I was going to speak. I held her hand, and as long as I merely held it she let it lie warm in mine. But when I raised it to my lips, and kissed the soft, open palm, she drew it away without displeasure.
“Not that, please,” she protested, and fell to whistling softly again, her chin in her hands. “I can’t sing,” she said, to break an awkward pause, “and so, when I’m fidgety, or have something on my mind, I whistle. I hope you don’t dislike it?”
“I love it,” I asserted warmly. I did; when she pursed her lips like that I was mad to kiss them.
“I saw you - at the station,” she said’ suddenly. “You - you were in a hurry to go.” I did not say anything, and after a pause she drew a long breath. “Men are queer, aren’t they?” she said, and fell to whistling again.
After a while she sat up as if she had made a resolution. “I am going to confess something,” she announced suddenly. “You said, you know, that you had ordered all this for something you - you wanted to say to me. But the fact is, I fixed it all - came here, I mean, because - I knew you would come, and I had something to tell you. It was such a miserable thing I - needed the accessories to help me out.”
“I don’t want to hear anything that distresses you to tell,” I assured her. “I didn’t come here to force your confidence, Alison. I came because I couldn’t help it.” She did not object to my use of her name.
“Have you found - your papers?” she asked, looking directly at me for almost the first time.
“Not yet. We hope to.”
“The - police have not interfered with you?”
“They haven’t had any opportunity,” I equivocated. “You needn’t distress yourself about that, anyhow.”
“But I do. I wonder why you still believe in me? Nobody else does.”
“I wonder,” I repeated, “why I do!”
“If you produce Harry Sullivan,” she was saying, partly to herself, “and if you could connect him with Mr. Bronson, and get a full account of why he was on the train, and all that, it - it would help, wouldn’t it?”
I acknowledged that it would. Now that the whole truth was almost in my possession, I was stricken with the old cowardice. I did not want to know what she might tell me. The yellow line on the horizon, where the moon was coming up, was a broken bit of golden chain: my heel in the sand was again pressed on a woman’s yielding fingers: I pulled myself together with a jerk.
“In order that what you might tell me may help me, if it will,” I said constrainedly, “it would be necessary, perhaps, that you tell it to the police. Since they have found the end of the necklace - ”
“The end of the necklace!” she repeated slowly. “What about the end of the necklace?”
I stared at her. “Don’t you remember” - I leaned forward - “the end of the cameo necklace, the part that was broken off, and was found in the black sealskin bag, stained with - with blood?”
“Blood,” she said dully. “You mean that you found the broken end? And then - you had my gold pocketbook, and you saw the necklace in it, and you - must have thought - ”
“I didn’t think anything,” I hastened to assure her. “I tell you, Alison, I never thought of anything but that you were unhappy, and that I had no right to help you. God knows, I thought you didn’t want me to help you.”
She held out her hand to me and I took it between both of mine. No word of love had passed between us, but I felt that she knew and understood. It was one of the moments that come seldom in a lifetime, and then only in great crises, a moment of perfect understanding and trust.
Then she drew her hand away and sat, erect and determined, her fingers laced in her lap. As she talked the moon came up slowly and threw its bright pathway across the water. Back of us, in the trees beyond the sea wall, a sleepy bird chirruped drowsily, and a wave, larger and bolder than its brothers, sped up the sand, bringing the moon’s silver to our very feet. I bent toward the girl.
“I am going to ask just one question.”
“Anything you like.” Her voice was almost dreary. “Was it because of anything you are going to tell me that you refused Richey?”
She drew her breath in sharply.
“No,” she said, without looking at me. “No. That was not the reason.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
ALISON’S STORY
She told her story evenly, with her eyes on the water, only now and then, when I, too, sat looking seaward, I thought she glanced at me furtively. And once, in the middle of it, she stopped altogether.
