while her eyes were still closed, he caught her to him with young salty kisses.
Presently they came out, and walked over the wet strip of beach into the warm loose sand, bedding their dripping bodies gratefully in its warmth. The waitress shivered: he moulded sand over her legs and hips, until she was half buried. He kissed her, stilling his trembling lips upon her mouth.
“I like you! I like you a lot!” he said.
“What did they tell you about me?” she said. “Did they talk about me?”
“I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t care about that. I like you.”
“You won’t remember me, honey, when you start going with the girls. You’ll forget about me. Some day you’ll see me, and you won’t even know me. You won’t recognize me. You’ll pass without speaking.”
“No,” he said. “I’ll never forget you, Louise. So long as I live.”
Their hearts were filled with the lonely thunder of the sea. She kissed him. They were hill-born.
He returned in late September.
In October, Gant, with Ben and Helen, departed for Baltimore. The operation, too long deferred, was now inevitable. His disease had grown steadily worse. He had gone through a period of incessant pain. He was enfeebled. He was frightened.
Rising at night, he would rouse the sleeping house with his cries, commanding terror with his old magnificence.
“I see it! I see it! The knife! The knife!… Do you see its shadow?… There! There! There!”
With Boothian gusto he recoiled, pointing to invulnerable nothings.
“Do you see him standing there in the shadows? So you’ve come at last to take the old man with you?… There he stands—the Grim Reaper—as I always knew he would. Jesus, have mercy on my soul!”
Gant lay in a long cot in the Urological Institute at Johns Hopkins. Every day a cheerful little man came briskly in and looked
