young physician of the other sex would have done in the circumstances.
She concluded to remain on the beach, where only the children were
playing in the sand, and where she could easily escape any other
companionship that threatened. After she had walked long enough to
spend the first passion of her reverie, she sat down under the cliff,
and presently grew conscious of his boat swinging at anchor in its
wonted place, and wondered that she had not thought he must come back
for that. Then she had a mind to tear up her letter as superfluous; but
she did not. She rose from her place under the cliff, and went to look
for the dory. She found it drawn up on the sand in a little cove. It
was the same place, and the water was so shoal for twenty feet out that
no one could have rowed the dory to land; it must be dragged up. She
laughed and blushed, and then boldly amused herself by looking for
footprints; but the tide must have washed them out long ago; there were
only the light, small footprints of the children who had been playing
about the dory. She brushed away some sand they had scattered over the
seat, and got into the boat and sat down there. It was a good seat, and
commanded a view of the sail-boat in the foreground of the otherwise
empty ocean; she took out her letter, and let it lie in the open hands
which she let lie in her lap.
She was not impatient to have the time pass; it went only too soon.
Though she indulged that luxury of terror in imagining her letter torn
up and scornfully thrown away, she really rested quite safe as to the
event; but she liked this fond delay, and the soft blue afternoon might
have lasted forever to her entire content.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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