peace was restored, were busy suckling their young.

A queer people, humorous and terrifying, making the girl feel that she
had placed her hand on something likeable, almost lovable, that had yet,
of a sudden, nearly frightened her to death.

She sat recovering herself and helped by the regiment of penguins who
marched up to the seal beach and, knowing better than to attempt to
cross it, stood bowing to the world in general and talking one to the
other perhaps on the horrors of war.

PART IV

CHAPTER XXI

TIME PASSES

It is not good to be alone. As the weeks passed she began to lose and
forget the feeling of surety in rescue and at times, now, she found
herself talking out loud, putting what was in her mind into speech as
though a companion were by, and sometimes she would hear a voice
hallooing to her and start and cast her eyes over the desolate beach
only to see the gulls.

The beach was always haunted by queer noises; the chanting sound of the
waves coming in, a faint sound like the beating of a drum at very low
tide, to say nothing of the booming of bitterns and the barking of brent
geese and the hundred voices of the wind. She would listen and listen,
her mind wandering aimlessly, and in the great rains, when the whole sea
was shut out by the downpour, the noise would lull her like opium.

The baby sea elephants lost their long black coats and put on their
suits of fine yellow fur and took themselves to the nursery by the
river, where all day long they played and tumbled and swam, and then she
would sit and watch them like a mother watching her children.

The great battle of the bulls seemed like something far away beyond
which other things were becoming vague. Something that was not meant to
be seen so close by human eyes, something that had pushed her still
further from man.

It was full summer now, the season of tremendous sunsets and when the
sky was clear, vast conflagrations lit themselves beyond the Lizard
Point painting the islands and purpling the skies, and one evening as
she sat in the western blaze watching the moving beach and listening to
the playing and quarrelling of the nursery a voice said to her:

"Some day all these will take to the sea and leave you. There will be
nothing here but the rocks and the sea."

It was as though the sunset had spoken.

The thought aroused her as a knock on the door arouses a sleeper.
Fighting against it her mind became more fully awake. She s