She shook off her briny blindness, and settled to the full sweep of the arms, quite silent now.  Some emotion, or exhaustion from the strain of the swimmer’s breath in speech, stopped her playfulness.  The pleasure she still knew was a recollection of the outward swim, when she had been privileged to cast away sex with the push from earth, as few men will believe that women, beautiful women, ever wish to do; and often and ardently during the run ahead they yearn for Nature to grant them their one short holiday truce.

But Aminta forgave him for bringing earth so close to her when there was yet a space of salt water between her and shore; and she smiled at times, that he might not think she was looking grave.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE PLIGHTING

They touched sand at the first draw of the ebb, and this being earth, Matey addressed himself to the guardian and absolving genii of matter-of-fact, by saying; ‘Did you inquire about the tides?’

Her head shook, stunned with what had passed.  She waded to shore, after motioning for him to swim on.  Men, in comparison beside their fair fellows, are so little sensationally complex, that his one feeling now, as to what had passed, was relief at the idea of his presence having been a warrantable protectorship.

Aminta’s return from the sea-nymph to the state of woman crossed annihiliation on the way back to sentience, and picked up meaningless pebbles and shells of life, between the sea’s verge and her tent’s shelter; hardly her own life to her understanding yet, except for the hammer Memory became, to strike her insensible, at here and there a recollected word or nakedness of her soul.

He swam along by the shore to where the boat was paddled, spying at her bare feet on the sand, her woman’s form.  He waved, and the figure in the striped tunic and trousers waved her response, apparently the same person he had quitted.

Dry and clad, and decently formal under the transformation, they met at Mrs. Collett’s breakfast-table, and in each hung the doubt whether land was the dream or sea.  Both owned to a swim; both omitted mention of the tale of white ducks.  Little Collett had brought Matey’s and his portmanteau into the house, by favour of the cook, through the scullery.  He, who could have been a pictorial and suggestive narrator, carried a spinning head off his shoulders from this wonderful Countess of Ormont to Matey Weyburn’s dark-eyed Browny at High Brent, and the Sunday walk in Sir Peter Wensell’s park.  Away and back his head went.  Browny was not to be thought of as Browny; she was this grand Countess of Ormont; she had married Matey Weyburn’s hero:  she would never admit she had been Browny.  Only she was handsome then, and she is handsome now; and she looks on Matey Weyburn now just as she did then.  How strange is the world!  Or how if we are the particular person destined to encounter the strange things of