They walked down the beach together.  The sea was light and mutinous.

“How untransparent it is,” he said, “lapis lazuli and turquoise and chrysoprase—­no emeralds or aquamarines, or sapphires.”

“How are we to get in our purple without an amethyst?”

“I don’t know.”

“That is what comes from not reading the Book of Revelations,” she said.

They saw big, dissolving, poisonous jellyfish in the sea, mysteriously without lines—­and tidy slabs of jellyfish on the beach.  They found a starfish, and wondered who came to dance a sword dance round it.  They picked up shells that looked as if they had fallen out of fading sunsets or glimmering dawns—­they looked into pools of shutting and opening sea anemones.

They never noticed a sardine box or an old boot.

They were happy.

Over her head was a scarlet paper sunshade.  It looked like a huge tropical flower.

“Paula,” he said—­and his eyes opened to her like a magic trap door.

That night they stayed indoors.

“Tell me the things that life has given you,” he said, “the things that have made you so rich.”

“If I am rich,” she said, “it is from the things that I have given.”

“Yes,” he said, “but why do you impoverish yourself at my expense?”

“Please,” she said, “don’t talk about that.  There are in all of us exposed places—­you can call them pain or romance—­Sehnsucht or memory—­but they are the sanctuaries of our hearts—­they cannot be violated.”

“Paula,” he said, “you have made too much of life.  You have made it into the sort of hope that is always a disillusionment.”

“Yes,” she murmured very low.

“Why were you so unpractical?” his bantering tone revived her.

“I have done for some one (even for you, perhaps) what I have never done for myself;” she was smiling.  “I will tell you a story.  There was once a man who loved me.  He was born with everything—­a marvellous name, great riches, beauty, a magnetic quality that I have never seen equalled.  I always reproached him with having added nothing to his inheritance—­no glory—­no achievement—­’I have spent,’ he would say, shrugging his shoulders.  ‘Wasted,’ I retorted tartly.  ’If you like.  I have never admitted my past or my future as barriers—­or even frontiers—­to my actions.  I have lived without forethought or arriere pensee—­without the weakness of regrets or the stinginess of precautions,’ and then he turned to me—­his eyes were half shut and his voice was muffled as if a flood were battering on the door of his dispassionateness, ’I have had everything in life except you,’ he said.  I smiled at him, a little sadly, a little cynically.  ’It is I who have given you the greatest gift,’ I said.  ’I have given you a regret and an illusion.  Vous avez donc tout eu.’  That night he killed himself.”

“And you, Paula, did you feel a murderess?”