Page:The Keeper of the Bees.pdf/149

 Jove! She wore a nightdress and one of those eiderdown kimonos over it! I remember by the feel of her and by her bare feet. She asked a few minutes’ grace before I should start. That means that she had gone to bed and was so driven she had decided that she’d bed in the sea, and she’d put on the kimono and come as she was to this point she knew how to find. She couldn’t have come up these rocks as still as thought, and she couldn’t have gone down them with the swiftness and ease she used if she had not known them perfectly, and a few minutes wouldn’t carry her far across the sands of this soaked beach. That means that she came from somewhere very near here.”

And then, as an outsider might speak to him, Jamie added: “And if you will recall what you said to her, old man, you gave her your word of honour that you wouldn’t try to find her.”

Then Jamie answered back and said: “But how am I going to keep that promise? How am I going to marry a girl with such a noble face, with hair of silk, and hands of such assurance; how am I going to stand up and swear that I’ll love her and take care of her so long as we both shall live, and then not work for her, not wonder where she is, and what is happening to her, and whether I could not do more for her than to give her my name at a pinch?”

Then Jamie, for the second time that night, thought of his Great Adventure, and he said to the sea and to the near-by personality who had commenced the conversation with him: “I’m not so sure that what I called a Great