“Getaway, I know you’re up to something.  You and Monkey and Muggs are tied up with those Wall Street bond getaways.”

“For the luvagod, cut that talk here!  First thing I know you’ll have me in a brainstorm too.”

“Those fake messenger boys that get themselves hired and, instead of delivering the bonds from one office to another—­disappear with them.  Muggs isn’t wearing that messenger’s uniform for nothing.  You and Monkey are working with him under cover on something.  You can’t pass a cop any more without tightening up.  I can feel it when I have your arm.  You’ve got that old over-your-shoulder look to you, Getaway.  My father—­had it.  My—­mother—­too.  Getaway!”

“By gad! you can’t beat a woman!”

“You don’t deny it.”

“I do!”

“Oh, Getaway, I’m glad then, glad!”

“Over-the-shoulder look.  Why, if I’d meet a plain-clothes this minute I’d go up and kiss him—­with my teeth in his ear.  That’s how much I got to be afraid of.”

“Oh, Getaway, I’m so glad!”

“Well, then, lay off—­”

“Getaway, you jumped then!  Like somebody had hit you, and it was only a kid popping a paper bag.”

“You get on my nerves.  You’d make a cat nervous, with your suspecting!  The more a fellow tries to do for a girl like you the less—­Look here now, you got to get the hell out of my business.”

She did not reply, but lay to the accompaniment of his violent nervousness and pinchings into the sand, with her face still away from him, while the dusk deepened and the ocean quieted.

After a while:  “Now, Marylin, don’t be sore.  I may be a rotten egg some ways, but when it comes to you, I’m there.”

“I’m not sore, Getaway,” she said, with her voice still away from him.  “Only I—­Let’s not talk for a minute.  It’s so quiet out here—­so full of rest.”

He sat, plainly troubled, leaning back on the palms of his hands and dredging his toes into the sand.  In the violet light the tender line of her chin to her throat still teased him.

Down farther along the now deserted beach a youth in a bathing suit was playing a harmonica, his knees hunched under his chin, his mouth and hand sliding at cross purposes along the harp.  That was the silhouette of him against a clean sky, almost Panlike, as if his feet might be cloven.

What he played, if it had any key at all, was rather in the mood of Chopin’s Nocturne in D flat major.  A little sigh for the death of a day, a sob for the beauty of that death, and a hope and ecstasy for the new day yet unborn—­all of that on a little throbbing mouth organ.

“Getaway,” cried Marylin, and sat up, spilling sand, “that’s it!  That’s what I meant a while ago.  Hear?  It can’t be talked.  That’s it on the mouth organ!”

“It?”

“It!  Yes, like I said.  Somebody has to feel it inside of him, just like I do, before he can understand.  Can’t you feel it?  Please!  Listen.”