She looked at him curiously.  She looked at the foot, too, being a woman, and this being the man above all others to her, and then she laughed out joyously and frankly.

“I don’t believe any one but you would have done that, Grant.  And what a foot you have!”

He replied, with much pomposity, that it was the far-famed Arabian foot, the instep of which arched so beautifully that water could flow beneath it without wetting the skin.  Just at present, though, he thought a little water might run over it to advantage, instead of under, the sand being a trifle mucky.  And why would no one else have done such a thing?  And he was glad she liked his foot; in fact, he was glad she liked anything about him, and rather wondered that she did, and the world had become to him a good place to live in.

All of which was but the sentimentalism which appertains to a man and a woman in love with each other, but the drift of thought continued in the direction suggested by his action and her comment.  They looked at the lake, with its shifting coloring of green and blue and purple, and he told her how, some day, he would teach her to swim like a Sandwich Island beauty, and she said she would like to learn.  She liked the water.

“I’m very glad of that,” he commented; “I like it myself.  I am a great bather.  I admire the English for the ‘tubbing’ which is made such a subject of jest against them by other people.  There must be water into which I may tumble when I rise in the morning, or water in abundance in some way, else I should be a trifle uncomfortable all day long.  I don’t mean just a mild lavatory business, you know, but a plunge or a cataract, or something of that sort.  It is barely possible, my dear, that you are going to marry a man whose remote ancestors were the product of evolution from otters, instead of monkeys.  Think of that!”

And she confessed, half-blushingly, her own regard for water, and that she had been laughed at by other women for what they deemed a fancy carried to an extreme.  And she said she was very glad that a great big Somebody was dainty in his ways.  While in many respects she could not approve of him, it was a comfort, at least, to be enabled to think of him as ever clean and wholesome, and as having one weakness of which she could condone.

He looked at her majesty, as she sat enthroned upon a little mound, but to her small oration made no reply.  He was worshiping her bodily.  And from this conversation came a sequel, a day or two later, which was but the worshiping put into things material.  Of his love and the bath he would have fancies, and he wanted what touched her to be from him.  She was surprised by a cumbrous package which, opened, revealed great things for a woman’s dalliance with water—­the soft Turkish towel, vast enough to envelop her, the perfumed soaps, and even the bath-mittens.  And she was a little frightened, maybe, at the personality of it all, but she recognized the nature of his fancy, and but loved him the more because he had it.  It was an odd gift, it is true, but they were odd people.  They were very close together.