"Venus, darling. Didn't you know the dove belonged to Venus? Didn't you know Venus was our goddess, and that she was born out of the waves, and came up all over foam? And that you look so like her that I feel as if you'd just been blown in on one of those silver streamers, and they might pull you back any minute if I didn't hold tight onto you?" He suited the act to the words with a vehemence that made her laugh out in rosy confusion: "Vance, I never did hear such things as you make up about people."

He laughed back and held her fast; but already his thoughts had wandered again to the ever-heaving welter of silver. "God, I wish a big gale would blow up this very minute—I'd give anything to see all those millions and millions of waves rear up and wrestle with each other."

Laura Lou shivered. "I guess we'd be frozen if they did."

"Why—are you cold?" he wondered, remembering how, as afternoon fell, she had grown pale and shivered in the garden of the Willows.

She shook her head, nestling down against him. "No—but I'm hungry, I believe."

"Hungry? Ye gods! So am I. You bright child, how did you find out?" He caught her close again, covering with kisses her eyes and lips and her softly beating throat.

He had pitched the suitcase down at their feet, and he stooped to open it, and pulled out a greasy-looking parcel. "What about picnicking here? I've always wanted to have the wild waves at my wedding party." He was unwrapping, and spreading out on the sand, beef sandwiches, slices of sausage and sticky cake, cheese, a bunch of grapes and a custard pie, all more or less mixed up with each other; and he and Laura Lou fell on them with hungry fingers. At last she declared: "Oh, Vance, we mustn't eat any more—oh, no, no, I couldn't … " but he continued to press the food on her, and as her lips opened to morsel after morsel the returning glow whipped her cheeks to carmine. Then he dug again into the suitcase, extracted a half bottle of champagne and a corkscrew—and looked about him desperately for glasses. "Oh, hell, what'll I do? Oh, child, there's nothing for us to drink it out of!"