Page:The Blind Bow-Boy (IA blindbowboy00vanv).pdf/207

 suddenly, she bent towards him and kissed his eyes. Let us go back to the house, Harold, she said.

They had been sitting on the dunes in the dying sunlight, for the day had been bright with a brightness, however, which merely served to accentuate the cold greyness of the place. A dragon-fly, shining purple and green, steered his course round and round Alice's head, like a miniature airplane. A flock of gulls swooped down over the sea, crying mournfully, and some of them disappeared under the grey waves, capped with white. A cool breeze was blowing in over the water and, as Alice rose, she drew the blue knitted scarf she was wearing more closely about her shoulders.

In the cottage, when they arrived, Emma, silent and stern, was laying the table with the gay variety of design which Alice instinctively hated. She especially detested the opaque white glass chickens of the Civil War period, consecrated to hold eggs, but the Spanish, Hungarian, and Brittany china offended her taste almost equally. She liked white plates with gold borders for the roasts, and engraved glass plates with gold borders for the salad and dessert. The cotton print curtains at the windows annoyed her, and her mind reverted to the consideration of some striped stiff taffetas she had examined at Johnson and Faulkner's. Their magnificence, distributed at the windows and in the wallpanels, would almost serve to furnish the drawing