rstand these gray-green waters. She knew them in
vision, not in reality. She cried out sharply and threw the window up.
The draggled bird fluttered in and sank on the floor. A sea-wind blew
in with it. The bird's wings shivered on her feet, and the wind on her
bosom. She stared over the land, swallowed up in the sea. Wreckage of
all sorts tossed and floated on it. Fences and broken gates and
branches of trees; and fragments of boats and nets and bits of cork;
and grass and flowers and seaweed--She thought--what did she think? She
thought she must be dreaming.

She felt like one drowning. Where could she find a shore?

She hurried to the bed and got her shell; its touch on her heart was
her first safety. In her nightgown as she was she ran with her naked
feet through the dim passages until she stood beside the grinding
stones....

"Child! child! child!"

"Where are you, my boy, where are you?"

"Aren't you coming? Must I lose you after all this?--Oh, come!"

"But tell me where you are!"

"In a few hours I should have been with you--a few hours after many
years."

"Oh, boy, for pity, tell me where to find you!"

"You are there waiting for me, aren't you, child? I know you are--I've
always known you were. What would you have said to me when you opened
the door in your blue gown?--"

"Oh, but say only where you are, my boy!"

"Do you know what I should have said? I shouldn't have said anything. I
should have kissed you--"

"Oh, let me come to you and you shall kiss me...."

But she listened in vain.

She went back to her room. The gull was still on the floor. Its wing
was broken. Her actions from this moment were mechanical; she did what
she did without will. First she bound the broken wing, and fetched
bread and water for the wounded bird. Then she dressed herself and went
out of the mill. She had a rope in her hands.

The water was not all around the mill. Strips and stretches of land
were still unflooded, or only thinly covered. But the face of the earth
had been altered by one of those great inland swoops of the sea that
have for centuries changed and re-changed the point of Sussex,
advancing, receding, shifting the coast-line, making new shores,
restoring old fields, wedding the soil with the sand.

Helen walked where she could. She had no choice of ways. She kept by
the edge of the water and went into no-man's land. A bank of rotting
grasses and dry reeds, which the waves had left uncovered, r