Free The Dawning of the Day by Elisabeth Ogilvie Page B

looked like some youthful deity caught unawares on the shore of a Grecian island. He turned his head and smiled at her as if the past moments had not existed.
    â€œCareful there,” he said. “The grass is some slippery.”
    They went down into the next cove. A warmth arose from the rounded beach rocks driven into a ridge by violent tides. The great ribs of a ship were silvery under the matted beach peas. On the other side of the cove the ground rose up into a rounding green shape against the sky, like a Viking barrow, and she had sense of the land’s end. Suddenly she could not wait but hurried on alone across the shifting stones and began to climb the steep slope.
    â€œAre you part goat?” Charles called after her. She laughed, and scrambled upward. When she reached the top, she felt as if she had attained the peak of the world. The ground fell away; the rocks that were a volcanic black jumble in one place and shelves white as marble in another went down into the sea and seemed to emerge again as long ledges, over which the swells broke. She heard the small cracking sound as a sea urchin hit the rocks and the gull that had dropped it came down with a great fanning of his wings.
    But beyond the broken shore and the leisurely pattern of the surf, past the barriers of the ledges, was the sea itself—not the twenty miles or so that lay between here and the mainland, but the thousands that reached beyond the tower of Matinicus Rock to Europe. The wind of distance blew against her.
    Charles didn’t come. She looked back and saw him sitting on the bleached timbers down in the cove, smoking. She wandered around for a little while. She found the fine white skeleton of a sea urchin gleaming in the short coarse grass, and wrapped it in her handkerchief and put it in her pocket. The sun was dipping toward the sea and her shadow was long behind her. The energy generated in her by the meeting with the Mark Bennetts had taken her a great distance today, and. she had worked off most of her sense of frustration.
    She went down into the cove again. “Do you know a short cut home?” she asked him.
    He gave her a sideways look under his lashes. “Now you’ve seen what’s at Sou’west Point, is it worth it?”
    â€œYou’re a cynic, Charles.”
    â€œOh, I know it’s something to see.” He got up, stretching. “I used to come down here in all weathers when my father kept sheep on here. Tell you when it’s real handsome. Dawn on a winter morning when you’re trying to get you a sea bird. One of those calm pretty mornings when the land’s all black but the east turns the color of a ripe peach.” He spun his cigarette at the water. “Come on, there’s an old cow path through the woods.”
    He went up from the shore by an easier way, toward the long dark crest of forest, and she followed him, bemused by the number of facets he had shown in an afternoon. A little more than a week ago she had seen him a simple creature, vividly handsome as a young horse, all gloss and fire and pure animal instinct. Now he was something more.
    She considered the other Bennetts. Mark was older, more heavily set in his ways. But Charles and his uncle Steve had the same quality of ease about them. That is, Charles had it at intervals; with his uncle it was probably more lasting. He seemed a tranquil personality; there was no tension in even his most preoccupied gestures.
    In the woods the warm red-brown light under the trees was flecked and striped with dusty gold.
    â€œNice thing about these woods,” Charles remarked across the silence, “you don’t have to think you’ll meet a bear or a moose. There’s not even a squirrel.”
    â€œBut they feel haunted,” said Philippa. “Hear my hushed tones? I don’t dare speak up for fear of scaring someone—or something.” She laughed.
    â€œNils Sorensen says that when his