might come up, obliterating
lighthouse, headlands, all the sea to the cliff's foot, with its purple
smother. Directly in front of him, below a piled mass of cumuli that
hung darkly from zenith to horizon, a line of livid whiteness would show
the sea's rim, while nearer him, half-way across the watery floor, great
shafts of light, flanked by others of varying brightness, poured down
from a gap in the cloud-roof and split themselves in patches of molten
silver upon the leaden greyness. And at his furthest right a sky of pure
pale blue might arch to where layers of filmy cirrus were blurred by a
faint burnished hue that was neither brown nor rose but a mingling of
the delicate exhaust of both.

Killigrew was not long in discovering this place, which he declared
presented an unrivalled stage for the setting of vast dream-dramas he
watched trailing their cloudy way across it, and Ishmael was not loth to
share his plateau with him. The incursion of Vassie was another matter,
but by this time--nearly a month after that momentous birthday--Ishmael
felt helplessly drifting. He was enjoying himself, while Killigrew
showed no signs of wishing to return to Paris and Vassie was blooming as
never before. She sat to him for sketches that never were finished, and
that to her eyes, though she did not say so, looked just the same even
when Killigrew declared a stroke more would wreck their perfection.
Ishmael was neglecting his personal supervision of the farm these
days--he had developed a new theory that it was time he tested how far
things could go well without him. He had heard a hint or two dropped to
the effect that the friend from foreign parts was only amusing himself
with proud Vassie, but he paid no heed. What could be more absurd, he
reflected, than the idea that she could want a boy a couple of years her
junior and a mere student to fall in love with her? Thus Ishmael, while
Killigrew laughed at him and with Vassie all day long, and she glowed
and answered him and seemed as light-hearted, as either of them.

On a sunlit day, one of those March days which, in Cornwall, can hold a
sudden warmth borrowed from the months to come, they all three sat upon
the grass of the plateau, accompanied by Boase, who had taken them on an
expedition to an ancient British village, where, with many little
screams, Vassie's wide skirts had had to be squeezed and pulled through
the dark underground "rooms" of a dead people. Now, as the day drew t