She tossed her head back and breathed as though to exhale the fumes of the dull and the inane from her inmost being. “Did you tell him that?” inquired Cowperwood, curiously. “Certainly I did.” “I don’t wonder he looks so solemn,” he said, turning and looking back at Greanelle and Mrs. Carter; they were sitting side by side in sand-chairs, the former beating the sand with his toes. “You’re a curious girl, Berenice,” he went on, familiarly. “You are so direct and vital at times. “Not any more than you are, from all I can hear,” she replied, fixing him with those steady eyes. “Anyhow, why should I be bored? He is so dull. He follows me around out here all the time, and I don’t want him.” She tossed her head and began to run up the beach to where bathers were fewer and fewer, looking back at Cowperwood as if to say, “Why don’t you follow?” He developed a burst of enthusiasm and ran quite briskly, overtaking her near some shallows where, because of a sandbar offshore, the waters were thin and bright. “Oh, look!” exclaimed Berenice, when he came up. “See, the fish! O-oh!” She dashed in to where a few feet offshore a small school of minnows as large as sardines were playing, silvery in the sun. She ran as she had for the bird, doing her best to frighten them into a neighboring pocket or pool farther up on the shore. Cowperwood, as gay as a boy of ten, joined in the chase. He raced after them briskly, losing one school, but pocketing another a little farther on and calling to her to come. “Oh!” exclaimed Berenice at one point. “Here they are now. Come quick! Drive them in here!” Her hair was blowy, her face a keen pink, her eyes an electric blue by contrast. She was bending low over the water—Cowperwood also—their hands outstretched, the fish, some five in all, nervously dancing before them in their efforts to escape. All at once, having forced them into a corner, they dived; Berenice actually caught one. Cowperwood missed by a fraction, but drove the fish she did catch into her hands. “Oh,” she exclaimed, jumping up, “how wonderful! It’s alive. I caught it.” She danced up and down, and Cowperwood, standing before her, was sobered by her charm. He felt an impulse to speak to her of his affection, to tell her how delicious she was to him. “You,” he said, pausing over the word and giving it special emphasis—“you are the only thing here that is wonderful to me.”