ake care of us if we miss our way
back."

Vashti smiled, and again half sadly, for out of her own past this child
confronted her. "That is brave, Annet; brave enough for the moment,
though by and by we shall have to be braver. See how the sands shine
below us! Shall we race for them and see who wins?"

She took Matthew Henry's small, unresisting hand, and the four pelted
down the slope. Something in Vashti's eyes--it could not have been in
the words of her last answer, for they were mysterious enough--had
apparently reassured Annet, who cast away care and called back in
triumph as she won the race down to the golden sands.

They were damp yet in patches, and these patches shone like metal
reflecting the greenish-blue spaces that showed between the clouds in
the heart of the gathering sunset. But along the fairway the sand lay
firm to the tread, yet soft to the look as a stretch of amber-coloured
velvet laid for their feet. Beyond rose Brefar, with its lower cliffs
in twilight, its rounded upper slopes one shining green. Vashti had
kilted her gown higher and helped the two girls to pin up their short
skirts. All had taken off their shoes and stockings, for here and there
a shallow channel must be waded.

They crossed without mishap, and, having shod themselves again, mounted
the turfy slope where the larks flew up from their hiding-places among
the stones. Vashti's talk was of the birds, for in all Brefar the spot
best worth visiting is Merriman's Head, where the birds congregate in
their thousands--cormorants, curlews, whimbrels, gulls and kittiwakes,
oyster-catchers, sandpipers--these all the year round--and in early
summer the razorbills and sea parrots. Zenobia, it appeared, knew not
only Merriman's Head, but every rock, down to the smallest and farthest
in the Off Islands, where these creatures nested. She spoke to them of
the island from which Annet took her name--a low-lying ridge to the
west of St. Ann's, curved like a snake, in nesting-time sheeted with
pink thrift. There the sea-parrots breed, and so thickly that you can
scarcely set foot ashore without plunging into their houses; but there
is a mound near the western end where no sea-parrot may come, for the
herring-gulls and the black-backs claim it for their own. She spoke of
Great Rose, still further westward, where the gulls encamp among the
ruined huts once used by the builders of the Monk Lighthouse; of Little
Rose, where the great cormorant is at ho