After that it was decided that she should sit for him each morning. They
did not speak again of Randy. There had been something in Becky's manner
which kept Archibald from saying more.
When they reached the lighthouse, the wind was blowing strongly. Before
them was the sweep of the Nantucket Shoals--not a ship in sight, not a
line of smoke, the vast emptiness of heaving waters.
Becky stood at the edge of the bluff, her red cape billowing out into a
scarlet banner, her hair streaming back from her face, the velvet tam
flattened by the force of the wind.
Archibald glanced at her. "Are you cold?"
"No, I love it."
He was chilled to the bone, yet there she stood, warm with life, bright
with beating blood----
"What a beastly lot of tumbling water," he said with sudden overmastering
irritation. "Let's get away from it, Becky. Let's get away."
Going back they took the road which led across the moor. The clear day
gave to the low hills the Persian carpet coloring which Cope had
despaired of painting. Becky, in her red cape, was almost lost against
the brilliant background.
But she was not the only one who challenged nature. For as she and
Archibald approached the outskirts of the town, they discerned, at some
distance, at the top of a slight eminence, two figures--a man and a
woman. The woman was dancing, with waving arms and flying feet.
The woman was dancing.
"She calls that dance 'Morning on the Moor,'" Cope told Becky; "she has a
lot of them--'The Spirit of the Storm,' 'The Wraith of the Fog.'"
"Do you know her?"
"No. But Tristram says she dances every morning. She is getting ready
for an act in one of the big musical shows."
The man sat on the ground and watched the woman dance. Her primrose cape
was across his knee. He was a big man and wore a cap. Becky, surveying
him from afar, saw nothing to command closer scrutiny. Yet had she
known, she might have found him worthy of another look. For the man with
the primrose cape was Dalton!
III
George Dalton, entering the little sitting-room of "The Whistling Sally,"
had to bend his head. He was so shining and splendid that he seemed to
fill the empty spaces. It seemed, indeed, to Becky, as if he were too
shining and splendid, as if he bulked too big, like a giant, top-heavy.
But she was not unmoved. He had been the radiant knight of her girlish
dreams--some of the glamour still remained. Her cheeks were touched with
pink as she greeted him.
He took both of her hands in his. "Oh, you lovely, lovely little thing,"
he said, and stood looking down at her.
They were the words he had said to her in the music-room. They revived
memories. Flushing a deeper pink, she drew away from him. "Why did you
come?"
"I could not stay away."
"How long have you been here?"
"Five days----"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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