s that her son would acquire a West
country burr, and it was considered more prudent, economically and
otherwise, to let him go on learning with his grandfather and herself.
Mark missed Cass when he went to school in Rosemarket, because there was
no such thing as playing truant there, and it was so far away that Cass
did not come home for the midday meal. But in summertime, Mark used to
wait for him outside the town, where a lane branched from the main road
into the unfrequented country behind the Rose Pool and took them the
longest way home along the banks on the Nancepean side, which were low
and rushy unlike those on the Rosemarket side, which were steep and
densely wooded. The great water, though usually described as
heart-shaped, was really more like a pair of Gothic arches, the green
cusp between which was crowned by a lonely farmhouse, El Dorado of Mark
and his friend, and the base of which was the bar of shingle that kept
out the sea. There was much to beguile the boys on the way home, whether
it was the sight of strange wildfowl among the reeds, or the exploration
of a ruined cottage set in an ancient cherry-orchard, or the sailing of
paper boats, or even the mere delight of lying on the grass and
listening above the murmur of insects to the water nagging at the sedge.
So much indeed was there to beguile them that, if after sunset the Pool
had not been a haunted place, they would have lingered there till
nightfall. Sometimes indeed they did miscalculate the distance they had
come and finding themselves likely to be caught by twilight they would
hurry with eyes averted from the grey water lest the kelpie should rise
out of the depths and drown them. There were men and women now alive in
Nancepean who could tell of this happening to belated wayfarers, and it
was Mark who discovered that such a beast was called a kelpie. Moreover,
the bar where earlier in the evening it was pleasant to lie and pluck
the yellow sea-poppies, listening to tales of wrecks and buried treasure
and bygone smuggling, was no place at all in the chill of twilight;
moreover, when the bar had been left behind and before the coastguards'
cottages came into sight there was a two-mile stretch of lonely cliff
that was a famous haunt of ghosts. Drowned light dragoons whose bodies
were tossed ashore here a hundred years ago, wreckers revisiting the
scene of their crimes, murdered excisemen . . . it was not surprising
that the boys hurried along the n