A fortnight passed away and Merefleet was still at the hotel at Old
Silverstrand. Mab was there also, the idol of the fisher-folk, and an
unfailing source of interest and admiration to casual visitors at the
hotel.
Merefleet, though he had become a privileged acquaintance, was still
wholly unenlightened with regard to the circumstances which had brought
her to the place under Seton's escort.
As time went on, it struck Merefleet that these two were a somewhat
incongruous couple. They dined together and they usually boated together
in the afternoon--this last item on account of Mab's passion for the sea;
but beyond this they lived considerably apart. Neither seemed to seek the
other's society, and if they met at lunch, it was never by preconceived
arrangement.
Merefleet saw more of Mab when she was ashore than Seton did. They would
meet on the quay, in old Quiller's cottage, or in the hotel-garden,
several times a day. Occasionally he would accompany them on the water,
but not often. He had a notion that Seton preferred his absence, and he
would not go where he felt himself to be an intruder.
Nevertheless, the primary fascination had not ceased to act upon him; the
glamour of the girl's beauty was still in his eyes something more than
earthly. And there came a time when Bernard Merefleet listened with
unconscious craving for the high, unmodulated voice, and smiled with a
tender indulgence over the curiously naïve audacity which once had made
him shrink.
As for Mab, she was too eagerly interested in various matters to give
more than a passing thought to the fact that the man she called Big Bear
had laid aside his surliness. If she thought about it at all, it was only
to conclude that their daily intercourse had worn away the outer crust of
his shyness.
She was always busy--in and out of the fishermen's cottages, where she
was welcomed as an angel--to and fro on a hundred schemes, all equally
interesting and equally absorbing. And Merefleet was called upon to
assist. She singled him out for her friendship because he was as one
apart and without interests. She drew him into her own bubbling life. She
laughed at him, consulted him, enslaved him.
All innocently she wove her spell about this man. He was lonely, she
knew; and she, in her ardent, great-souled pity for all such, was willing
to make cheerful sacrifice of her own time and strength if thus she might
ease but a little the burden that galled a fellow-traveller's shoulders.
Merefleet came upon her once standing in the sunshine with Mrs. Quiller's
baby in her arms. She beckoned him to speak to her. "Come here if you
aren't afraid of babies!" she said, displaying her charge. "Look at him,
Big Bear! He's three weeks old to-day. Isn't he fine?"
"What do you know about babies?" said Merefleet, with his eyes on her
lovely flushed face.
She nodded in her sprightly fashion, but her eyes were far away on the
distant horizon, and her soul with them. "I know a lot, Big Bear," she
said.
Merefleet watched her, well pleased with the sight. She stood rocking to
and fro. Her gaze was fixed and tender.
"I wonder what you see," Merefleet said, after a pause.
Her eyes came back at once to her immediate surroundings.
"Shall I tell you, Big Bear?" she said.
"Yes," said Merefleet, marvelling at the radiance of her face.
And, her voice hushed to a whisper, she moved a pace nearer to him and
told him.
"Just a little baby friend of mine who lives over there," she said. "I'm
going to see him some day. I guess he'll be glad, don't you?"
"Who wouldn't?" said Merefleet. "But that's not the West, you know."
"No," she said simply. "He's in the Land beyond the sea, Big Bear." And
with a strange little smile into his face, she drew the shawl closer
about the child in her arms and disappeared into Quiller's cottage.
There was something in this interview that troubled Merefleet
unaccountably. But when he saw her again, her mirth was brimming over,
and he thought she had forgotten.