paralysed in the warm sand? Three flaxen heads--a fair face
with friendly blue--grey eyes, a slim hand pressing his, a quick voice
speaking his name--"So you do believe in being good?" Yes, and a sort
of atmosphere as of some old walled-in English garden, with pinks, and
cornflowers, and roses, and scents of lavender and lilaccool and fair,
untouched, almost holy--all that he had been brought up to feel was
clean and good. And suddenly he thought: 'She might come along the front
again and see me!' and he got up and made his way to the rock at the far
end of the beach. There, with the spray biting into his face, he could
think more coolly. To go back to the farm and love Megan out in the
woods, among the rocks, with everything around wild and fitting--that,
he knew, was impossible, utterly. To transplant her to a great town,
to keep, in some little flat or rooms, one who belonged so wholly to
Nature--the poet in him shrank from it. His passion would be a mere
sensuous revel, soon gone; in London, her very simplicity, her lack of
all intellectual quality, would make her his secret plaything--nothing
else. The longer he sat on the rock, with his feet dangling over a
greenish pool from which the sea was ebbing, the more clearly he saw
this; but it was as if her arms and all of her were slipping slowly,
slowly down from him, into the pool, to be carried away out to sea; and
her face looking up, her lost face with beseeching eyes, and dark, wet
hair-possessed, haunted, tortured him! He got up at last, scaled the low
rock-cliff, and made his way down into a sheltered cove. Perhaps in the
sea he could get back his control--lose this fever! And stripping off
his clothes, he swam out. He wanted to tire himself so that nothing
mattered and swam recklessly, fast and far; then suddenly, for no
reason, felt afraid. Suppose he could not reach shore again--suppose the
current set him out--or he got cramp, like Halliday! He turned to swim
in. The red cliffs looked a long way off. If he were drowned they
would find his clothes. The Hallidays would know; but Megan perhaps
never--they took no newspaper at the farm. And Phil Halliday's words
came back to him again: "A girl at Cambridge I might have Glad I haven't
got her on my mind!" And in that moment of unreasoning fear he vowed
he would not have her on his mind. Then his fear left him; he swam in
easily enough, dried himself in the sun, and put on his clothes. His
heart felt sore, but no l