Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/315

 tenances of toilet; his heavy bowl and crock of cool water and his single, stringy towel; he took time to descend to the kitchen for hot water; and though he had shaved that morning, he shaved carefully again, polished his shoes and brushed his clothes. Also he took time, when he obtained from a locked drawer the note she had written him asking him to come to dinner that night of the Lovells' dance, to compare her writing then with her writing now, and he wondered about the difference. But at last he set off to her.

Marjorie then and during the succeeding hour before he reached her was not at Jen Cordeen's but on the beach of the lake; for of course she had no idea when Gregg might get her note or when he might come; and she needed the lake this evening.

It is in reality a sea, that body of water upon which lies Chicago; and the city is situated, not up an estuary or behind a harbor or on a bay; no, the city faces right out to sea. You gaze from the streets over water limitless to the east, limitless around the circle till, north, your eye catches the shore; limitless, likewise, stretches the sea to the south; great ships steam upon it; lighthouses point to the sky; storms blow and waves wash and break and boom oceanlike on the shore, and the wind comes down from over water—vast, elemental water—water, nothing else. Or the wind is gone; not even a breeze; calm; but a hundred miles away over the water may be wind, and so the surface before you moves of itself, it seems, in rounded, silent swells, slipping toward the shore till they whiten in tiny, rustling breakers on the edge of the sand, and run up to your feet and flow back and run at you again.

So it was this evening, while Marjorie sat on the sand, the tiny waves rustling below her feet, the silent