But the small sounds of things near and finite, drumming persistently on her ears, at last made themselves audible, growing upon her attention until she found herself listening to a murmur of talking, broken now and then by a rich, vibrant note of laughter. She heard it first as a little part of her pleasure of sight and sound, but presently some disturbing reminder in it, some painful memory, distracted her; finally turned, first her face, then her feet, in the direction of the flower-planted western terrace. With a few steps she had the talkers in sight,—Thair, his riding-crop slashing at the ragged chrysanthemums; Julia Budd, a sheaf of heliotrope in one arm; and Longacre, whose hand, while Thair talked, plucked and plucked and strewed the path with the small purple blossoms of one of the hanging sprays. Florence paused, her impulse to join them somehow quenched. Thair, with his genial talk, seemed to have no association with the other two. He might as well have been somewhere else. Though the girl’s face was turned toward the sea, and Longacre’s eyes were on the heliotrope, they seemed, by something akin in expression, somehow sharply, intimately drawn together. Florence saw them thus for a moment. Then Julia turned, Longacre looked up at her, their eyes met. The spirit of the girl’s voice had shot Florence with sharp misery; but it was the full look of Longacre’s eyes that, had they moved a hair’s breadth from Julia’s face, would have seen Florence standing, looking through the passion-vines, that held her for a minute still, and staring. Then noiselessly, like an eavesdropper, she retreated. She felt wretchedly that she had spied on him, had interrupted something not meant for her to see. She had an overwhelming impulse to escape the confines of flowers and voices, a need of something not less large and bitter than the sea. It was not thought, but impulse that directed her steps, that turned them so precipitately down the drive. Near the end of the grounds she began to run. Under the shelter of the oaks she slackened her pace, but her gait still had a headlong haste, and only when she broke from the fringe of foliage out upon the slope of sand, with the green waves bowing and breaking at her feet, did she stop to get breath. Even then she did not look back over the way she had come, but out across the water that had grown less blue than gray. The only thing before her was that she had seen another receive what she had thought her own. Intolerable! It goaded her to motion. Blind to seeing, deaf to hearing, incapable of thought, she hurried down a space of endless sound and emptiness. Oh, to get away from herself! She ran to outstrip herself, that self that could only remember the look in the garden, that could only endlessly repeat that she had lost him! It was upon her, the possibility she would not face yesterday. It had her unawares. She could not endure it!