to the isle
on this side by a seagoing craft; once an active wharf, whence many a
fine public building had sailed--including Saint Paul's Cathedral.

The timorous shadowy shapes descended the footway, one at least of them
knowing the place so well that she found it scarcely necessary to guide
herself down by touching the natural wall of stone on her right hand, as
her companion did. Thus, with quick suspensive breathings they
arrived at the bottom, and trod the few yards of shingle which, on the
forbidding shore hereabout, could be found at this spot alone. It was so
solitary as to be unvisited often for four-and-twenty hours by a
living soul. Upon the confined beach were drawn up two or three
fishing-lerrets, and a couple of smaller ones, beside them being a rough
slipway for launching, and a boathouse of tarred boards. The two lovers
united their strength to push the smallest of the boats down the slope,
and floating it they scrambled in.

The girl broke the silence by asking, 'Where are the oars?'

He felt about the boat, but could find none. 'I forgot to look for the
oars!' he said.

'They are locked in the boathouse, I suppose. Now we can only steer and
trust to the current!'

The currents here were of a complicated kind. It was true, as the girl
had said, that the tide ran round to the north, but at a special moment
in every flood there set in along the shore a narrow reflux contrary to
the general outer flow, called 'The Southern' by the local sailors. It
was produced by the peculiar curves of coast lying east and west of the
Beal; these bent southward in two back streams the up-Channel flow on
each side of the peninsula, which two streams united outside the
Beal, and there met the direct tidal flow, the confluence of the three
currents making the surface of the sea at this point to boil like a pot,
even in calmest weather. The disturbed area, as is well known, is called
the Race.

Thus although the outer sea was now running northward to the roadstead
and the mainland of Wessex 'The Southern' ran in full force towards the
Beal and the Race beyond. It caught the lovers' hapless boat in a
few moments, and, unable to row across it--mere river's width that
it was--they beheld the grey rocks near them, and the grim wrinkled
forehead of the isle above, sliding away northwards.

They gazed helplessly at each other, though, in the long-living faith
of youth, without distinct fear. The undulations increased in mag