“I have the other kind of times,—­when I wish that I had tried to do something.”

“Oh yes, I have those, too.  It’s wholesome to be ashamed of not having tried to do anything; but to be ashamed of having tried—­it’s like death.  There seems no recovery from that.”

He did not take advantage of her confession, or try to tempt her to further confidence; and women like men who have this wisdom, or this instinctive generosity, and trust them further.

“And the worst of it is that you can’t go back and be like those that have never tried at all.  If you could, that would be some consolation for having failed.  There is nothing left of you but your mistake.”

“Well,” he said, “some people are not even mistakes.  I suppose that almost any sort of success looks a good deal like failure from the inside.  It must be a poor creature that comes up to his own mark.  The best way is not to have any mark, and then you’re in no danger of not coming up to it.”  He laughed, but she smiled sadly.

“You don’t believe in thinking about yourself,” she said.

“Oh, I try a little introspection, now and then.  But I soon get through:  there isn’t much of me to think about.”

“No, don’t talk in that way,” she pleaded, and she was very charming in her earnestness:  it was there that her charm lay.  “I want you to be serious with me, and tell me—­tell me how men feel when.”—­

A sudden splashing startled her, and looking round she saw a multitude of curious, great-eyed, black heads, something like the heads of boys, and something like the heads of dogs, thrusting from the water, and flashing under it again at sight of them with a swish that sent the spray into the air.  She sprang to her feet.  “Oh, look at those things!  Look at them!  Look at them!” She laid vehement hands upon the young man, and pushed him in the direction in which she wished him to look, at some risk of pushing him overboard, while he laughed at her ecstasy.

“They’re seals.  The bay’s full of them.  Did you never see them on the reef at Jocelyn’s?”

“I never saw them before!” she cried.  “How wonderful they are!  Oh!” she shouted; as one of them glanced sadly at her over its shoulder, and then vanished with a whirl of the head.  “The Beatrice Cenci attitude!”

“They ’re always trying that,” said Libby.  “Look yonder.”  He pointed to a bank of mud which the tide had not yet covered, and where a herd of seals lay basking in the sun.  They started at his voice, and wriggling and twisting and bumping themselves over the earth to the water’s edge, they plunged in.  “Their walk isn’t so graceful as their swim.  Would you like one for a pet, Miss Breen?  That’s all they ’re good for since kerosene came in.  They can’t compete with that, and they’re not the kind that wear the cloaks.”

She was standing with her hand pressed hard upon his shoulder.

“Did they ever kill them?”