Page:In the days of the comet.djvu/218

 the water and splashed it towards 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 towards 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 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 quite unsuspected pursuit of them, through the soft and noiseless sand.