If Hauman had heard, he didn’t show it by the slightest move. He was stretched full length, his arms and legs spread wide, giving himself to the sun. The tawny curls trembled lightly in the breeze, his chest rose and fell in a steady slow rhythm. Below the ribs the body sloped sharply to the hollow of his stomach, so that the shorts, so tight when he stood up, lay loosely about his waist. The blue eyes stared into the sky. John Grandin wondered what he was thinking, but he was reluctant to disturb that repose, which seemed, except for the heaving ribs, deathlike. He could not say why he admired him so; it was like one’s feeling for the very young, whom one takes pleasure in merely to look at or watch, without expectation of return, without thought of any exchange at all, intellectual or emotional. . . . But now a different picture presented itself to his mind, called up by what morbid intuition he would never know: a picture of Hauman in battle dress, gaitered, helmeted, strapped about with cartridge belts, a tommy gun grasped in his outstretched hand, lying (as he here lay) on a beach, but sprawled face down, with the first small waves of the incoming tide washing gently around him. . . .

Did the intensity of his emotion reach across to the other? If so, Hauman did his best speedily to reassure him that all would be well. As if they had been at that moment in some secret communication, he turned his head on the sand and regarded Grandin with a grave smile—a smile which his good nature (or vanity or youth or eagerness to please) could not long keep from turning into a broad grin.

Undone, John Grandin felt himself slipping into a peculiar morass of emotion, unprecedented in his experience: sadness, desire for he knew not what, admiration, and a foolish wish that it might be he who was to die instead. . . .

VIII

VIII

“I hate to break this up,” Bill Howard said, “but ain’t it time for lunch?”

A good half of the sun bathers had gone. Pete had left the umbrellas standing, against their possible return later.

“I could lie here all day,” Mrs. Howard murmured from the sand, “and just die.”

“Mustn’t die on an empty stomach, Sadie. Come along.” He picked up their towels and his robe and headed for the path to the bluff.

“I don’t mind about lunch,” his wife said as she started after him, “but god, I am interested in washing off this sickening smell.”

“They’re comical, aren’t they,” Hauman said.

“We’re expecting you to stay to lunch with us,” Ethel said.

“But that’s not fair. In the first place—”

“In the first place, our lunches are already paid for at the hotel,” Grandin said. “Please don’t disappoint us.”