strung up. Nan's form of fearlessness, combined as it was with
the agility of a supple body excellently trained, would carry her lightly
through all physical adventures, much as her arrowy strength and skill
carried her through the breakers without blundering or mishap and let her
now ride buoyantly on each green mountain as it towered.

Barry, emerging spluttering from one of these, said "All very jolly for
you, Nan. You're a practised hand. We're being drowned. I'm going out of
it," and he dived through another wave for the shore. Kay, a clumsier
swimmer, followed him, and Nan rode her tossing horses, laughing at them,
till she was shot onto the beach and dug her fingers deep into the
sucking sand.

"A very pretty landing," said Barry, generously, rubbing his bruised
limbs and coughing up water.

Gerda rose from the foam where she had been playing serenely impervious
to the tauntings of Kay.

Barry said "Happy child. She's not filled up with salt water and battered
black and blue."

Nan remarked that neither was she, and they went to their rock
crannies to dress. They dressed and undressed in a publicity, a mixed
shamelessness that was almost appalling.

They rode back to Marazion after tea along the high road, more soberly
than they had come.

"Tired, Gerda?" Barry said, at the tenth mile, as they pulled up a hill.
"Hold on to me."

Gerda refused to do so mean a thing. She had her own sense of honour, and
believed that everyone should carry his or her own burden. But when they
had to get off and walk up the hill she let him help to push her bicycle.

"Give us a few days, Nan," said Barry, "and we'll all be as fit as you.
At present we're fat and scant of breath from our sedentary and useful
life."

"Our life"--as if they had only the one between them.

At Newlyn Nan stopped. She said she was going to supper with someone
there and would come on later. She was, in fact, tired of them. She
dropped into Stephen Lumley's studio, which was, as usual after painting
hours, full of his friends, talking and smoking. That was the only way to
spend the evening, thought Nan, talking and smoking and laughing, never
pausing. Anyhow that was the way she spent it.

She got back to Marazion at ten o'clock and went to her room at the
little cafe. Looking from its window, she saw the three on the shore by
the moonlit sea. Kay was standing on the paved causeway, and Barry and
Gerda, some way off, were wading among the roc