of them, now clear as crystal, blue
on their surface, with green depths and red shelving rock.

"Now you sit there," he said cheerfully. "No one will touch you. The
crabs won't get at you."

He looked about him and noticed with surprise where he was. He was
sitting on the farther corner of the very beach where the Scarlet
Admiral had landed with his men. It was out there beyond that bend
of rock that the wonderful ship had rode, with its gold and silk, its
jewelled masts and its glittering board. Directly opposite to him
was the little green path that led up the hill, and above it the very
field--Farmer Ede's field!

For a long, long time they sat there in silence. He forgot Charlotte
in his interest over his discovery, staring about him and watching how
quickly the August afternoon was losing its heat and colour, so that
already a little cold autumnal wind was playing about the sand, the
colours were being drawn from the sky, and a grey web was slowly pulled
across the sea.

"Now," he said cheerfully at last, to Charlotte, "I'll look for the
crabs."

"I hate crabs," she said. "I want to go home."

"You can't go home," he answered furiously. "What's the good of saying
that over and over again? You aren't going yet, so it's no use saying
you are."

"You're a horrid little boy," she brought out with a kind of inanimate
sob.

He did not reply to that; he was still trying to behave like a
gentleman. How could he ever have liked her? Why, her hair was not so
much after all. What was hair when you come to think of it? Mary got
on quite well with hers, ugly though it was. She was stupid, stupid,
stupid! She was like someone dead. As he searched for the crabs that
weren't there he felt his temper growing. Soon he would lead her back to
her mother and leave her there and never see her again.

But this was not the climax of the afternoon.

When he looked up from gazing into the pool the whole world seemed to
have changed. He was still dazzled perhaps by the reflection of the
water in his eyes, and yet it was not altogether that. It was not
altogether because the day was slipping from afternoon into evening.

The lazy ripple of the water as it slutched up the sand and then broke,
the shadows that were creeping farther and farther from rock to rock,
the green light that pushed up from the horizon into the faint blue, the
grey web of the sea, the thick gathering of the hills as they crept
more closely about the littl