She was sitting on an over-turned boat, her chin in her hands, staring out to sea.  The soft tide of the bay lapped almost at her feet, and the draperies of her white gown melted hazily into the sands.  She looked like a wraith, a despondent phantom of the sea, although the adjective is redundant.  Nobody ever thinks of a cheerful phantom.  Strangely enough, considering her evident sadness, she was whistling softly to herself, over and over, some dreary little minor air that sounded like a Bohemian dirge.  She glanced up quickly when I made a misstep and my dishes jingled.  All considered, the tray was out of the picture:  the sea, the misty starlight, the girl, with her beauty—­even the sad little whistle that stopped now and then to go bravely on again, as though it fought against the odds of a trembling lip.  And then I came, accompanied by a tray of little silver dishes that jingled and an unmistakable odor of broiled chicken!

“Oh!” she said quickly; and then, “Oh!  I thought you were Jenkins.”

“Timeo Danaos—­what’s the rest of it?” I asked, tendering my offering.  “You didn’t have any dinner, you know.”  I sat down beside her.  “See, I’ll be the table.  What was the old fairy tale?  ‘Little goat bleat:  little table appear!’ I’m perfectly willing to be the goat, too.”

She was laughing rather tremulously.

“We never do meet like other people, do we?” she asked.  “We really ought to shake hands and say how are you.”

“I don’t want to meet you like other people, and I suppose you always think of me as wearing the other fellow’s clothes,” I returned meekly.  “I’m doing it again:  I don’t seem to be able to help it.  These are Granger’s that I have on now.”

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.