time would heal the memory, as time heals all hurts.

The other thing that emerged unquestionably out of the chaos was how
they were together; how they had been together through everything; how
they were together now, sailing pine-bark boats and seeking fresh roads;
how, along any roads they might chance to find, they would journey
together, knowing themselves admirable travelling-companions, knowing
that to be well amused on the road is three-parts of the journey's hope.
As Betty had said, 'We can help each other, and no one else in the world
can help us. Because we know each other so awfully well. Don't you see?'

Prudence had seen--seen, too, that it was the best thing they had--the
thing that would in the end matter, however much everything else failed.
She had seen the Crevequers cast up, as it were, out of fire, holding
this gold to them, when all else--the old and the new things alike--had
melted from their hands.

And to all their questioning life could give them as yet this answer
alone. The other answers would work themselves out through the veiled
years, slowly, painfully perhaps. It was, then, a triumphant thing to
have one possession safe for all time--one thing that the inscrutable
years, and failure and joy and tears, could not touch; one thing, in a
world of uncertain values, that the flames of the crucible would not at
all transmute. It was, in fine, an admirable thing that they had one
another to sail boats with.

Tommy was throwing stones, with his left hand, after his boat, with
intent to hasten it. In the long run, even taking into account undoubted
occasional successes, experience goes to show that this is not really a
very useful thing to do, even when the right hand is used. Tommy's boat
presently was struck and capsized.

'All right,' Tommy observed. 'Yours isn't going to come in to shore by
itself--you needn't think it. We'll have a bombardment.... Mine was a
rotten boat.... If I couldn't make a better boat than that.... There,
that's got it. Now they can race in upside down. C-come round and get
them.'

The race in upside down was a leisurely process. The owners got bored at
last, and decided to abandon the crafts, which remained bobbing together
upside down, twin derelicts far from the shore.

Out of the shadowed green pine-gloom the Crevequers came up again on to
the steep, climbing hill-path, whose stones were hot with the evening
sunshine. The warm still air was sweet with the pin