Page:Across the Stream.djvu/117

Rh the same fine tan of constant exposure. His hair, thick and dripping from the spray, had for the present lost its tawny curliness, and he had to throw back his head from time to time, in order to keep it out of his eyes. And in his mind there was the same wildness of out-of-doors rapture that characterized the youth of his supple body: he could have laughed with pleasure at the mere fact of this doubtful battle between himself and the wind-maddened sea. But all the time in some secret chamber of his brain there sat, so to speak, a steadfast and keen observer, who was making notes with all his might, and pushing them down into the cool caves of memory, to be brought forth (in case Archie came safely to land) from their cold storage, and fitted with words which should reproduce the exultation of wind and sun and sea. And in a chamber more secret yet, a chamber not in his brain but in his heart, sat the knowledge that among the others his second cousin, Helena Vautier, in particular was surely looking at him from the terraced garden high above the cliff. She should see (and, for that matter, so should her sister Jessie) how to handle a boat. She had been strong in her dissuasion of his starting at all, and that, if Archie was quite honest with himself, was one of the principal reasons why he had insisted on doing so. She had mentioned casually the other day that there was nothing in the world she liked better than the careless "go-to-the-deuce" attitude towards danger which to her represented manliness, and Archie had been only too delighted to give her this vigorous exhibition of it. But it tremendously pleased him that, on his announcement of his intention to go across the bay, she should have so strenuously dissuaded him. To his mind that conveyed the impression that she liked him as much as she liked exhibitions of manliness.

He was already opposite the opening into the