iver to my very marrow.

After they had followed a certain marshy band of vivid green for
several pasture-lengths, Margarita shook her head slightly, retraced
her steps and stopped at a point where three or four great flat stones
made a sort of causeway across the glistening, muddy strip, and Roger,
following her as she jumped lightly over, saw that they stood upon a
little rocky promontory joined only by this strange bit of marsh to
the mainland. The strip was here not a hundred feet wide, and winding
in on either side of this two little inlets crept sluggishly along and
lost themselves in the marsh. The promontory was there very barren and
it seemed to Roger that the girl was going to lead him out into the
shallow cove that faced them, but a few more steps showed him that
just here the point of land curved around this cove, which swept far
inland, and broadened out wonderfully into several acres of meadow-hay
dotted with sparse, stunted cedars.

Directly before him lay a wet, shining beach, for the tide was half
gone, and a hundred yards out, the tops of what might almost have
been a built wall of nasty pointed rocks formed a perfect lagoon
across the face of the promontory. At high tide these would not show,
but they were there, always guarding, always bare-toothed, and as far
again beyond them a bell-buoy mounted on a similar ledge seemed to
point to the existence of a double barrier. It was a great lonesome
bay of the Atlantic that he looked at, its arms on either side
desolate, scrubby and forbidding, with not a hint of life. Suddenly,
as he stared, wondering, and Margarita stood quiet beside him, a long,
quavering bellow came from behind him.

"It is the cow," said Margarita reassuringly, as he whirled around,
"she is calling Caliban to milk her, I suppose."

Again the impatient, minor bellow rose on the air, and Roger perceived
that what he had carelessly passed over as a great sand dune was in
reality a square cottage built of sand, apparently, for it was
precisely the colour and texture of sand, sloping off in a succession
of outbuildings, just as the cliffs and dunes slope, windowless,
nearly, from that side at least, and offering only the anxious cow,
peering from the furthest outhouse, as evidence of life. Close up to
it on one side, the right, a great, cliff-like spur of rock shot up
and ran like a wall for fifty feet, then fell away gradually into the
sand of the beach which ran up to meet it; the cot