natural
again.

As he looked at her now sitting in the sunset this return of beauty
struck him as it almost might have struck the sea elephants. It pleased
him. Had he put his thoughts into words he would have said that she was
filling out and getting more pleasant looking. At her very best he would
never have tacked the word beauty on to her; a buxom, rotund, beady-eyed
young female would have made the word beauty spring to his lips--Cleo
de Bromsart, never. But she was getting more pleasant looking and her
eyes were getting over their "stiffness"--which was something, and he
felt pleased.

Presently, alone in his cave, he would bring his fist down on his thigh
with a bang and chuckle over her contrarieties, reviewing her against
that terrific picture he had seen in the cave when he had gone to fetch
the sou'wester; the picture of a man who had been torn to pieces by
Burgomasters and cormorants. It had been necessary to wash the
sou'wester for a long time in sea water before bringing it back.

She had done that chap in proper; the work of the gulls and the work of
the girl were hardly dissociated in his mind--there was the Result. Just
as though a baby had smashed a rock with its fist. Hence the chuckles,
heightened by her clinging ways, her fragility, her musical voice, her
starvation due to loneliness, her double tongue, her unaccountable
tricks of manner.

And she, as she sat in the sunset not knowing his thoughts, had you
asked her how she felt about him would have answered with steadfast eyes
that she loved him. Meaning that she loved him as she had learned to
love the sea-elephants, or as she would have loved a great carthorse
that had stood between her and danger, or a huge dog. She scarcely
thought of him as a man--just as a great benign thing, human, but nearer
to the heart than any human being life had brought her in contact with
till now.

Her almost passionate gratitude had little to do with this measure of
him; any kindly man might have done what he had done. It was perhaps the
feeling of his great strength, of his possible fierceness that gave the
touch of benignity to him.

"Weren't you afraid of them sea cows?" said he at last, "you must have
come clean through them to get to that cave."

"No," she replied, "I didn't mind them, quite the reverse. I came here
because of them."

"Because of them!"

"Yes. They were company."

"Meaning--"

"Friends."

"Y'mean to say--friends did you call t