Section 4
Two people were bathing in the sea.
I had awakened. It was still that white and wonderful night, and
the blue band of clear sky was no wider than before. These people
must have come into sight as I fell asleep, and awakened me almost
at once. They waded breast-deep in the water, emerging, coming
shoreward, a woman, with her hair coiled about her head, and in
pursuit of her a man, graceful figures of black and silver, with a
bright green surge flowing off from them, a pattering of flashing
wavelets about them. He smote the water and splashed it toward
her, she retaliated, and then they were knee-deep, and then for an
instant their feet broke the long silver margin of the sea.
Each wore a tightly fitting bathing dress that hid nothing of the
shining, 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 the
heart, and fled up the beach obliquely toward me, running like the
wind, and passed me, vanished amidst the black distorted bushes,
and was gone --she and her pursuer, in a moment, over the ridge of
sand.
I heard him shout between exhaustion and laughter. . . .
And suddenly I was a thing of bestial fury, standing up with hands
held up and clenched, rigid in gesture of impotent threatening,
against the sky. . . .
For this striving, swift thing of light and beauty was Nettie--and
this was the man for whom I had been betrayed!
And, it blazed upon me, I might have died there by the sheer ebbing
of my will--unavenged!
In another moment I was running and stumbling, revolver in hand, in
quiet unsuspected pursuit of them, through the soft and noiseless
sand.
