rats' tails on her slim
white shoulders, which were just flushed with the nip of the sea. The clear
drops sparkled on her pretty brown face like pearls and diamonds, and
seemed loth to fall. Her little pink toes curled up out of the creamy wash
to look at her.

"Where are your things?" asked the boy.

"In the cave yonder."

"Go and get dressed," he said, looking down at her with as little thought
of unseemliness as she herself.

"Not at all. I'm quite warm."

"Well, I'm going to dry my things," and he began to wriggle out of his
knitted blue guernsey. "Also," he said, following up a previous train of
thought, "let me tell you there are devil-fish about here. One came up with
one of our pots yesterday."

"Pooh! I killed one with a stick this morning. They're only baby ones;
comme ca," and she measured about two inches between her little pink palms.

"This one was so big," and he indicated a yard or so, between the flapping
sleeves of the guernsey in which his head was still involved.

"I don't believe you, Phil Carre," she said with wide eyes. "You're just
trying to frighten me."

"All right! Just you wait till one catches hold of your leg when you're out
swimming all by yourself. If I'd known you'd be so silly I'd never have
taught you."

"You didn't teach me. You only dared me in and showed me how."

"Well then! And if I hadn't you'd never have learnt."

"Maybe I would. Someone else would have taught me."

"Who then?"

And to that she had no answer. For if the good God intends a man to drown
it is going against His will to try to thwart him by learning to
swim,--such, at all events, was the very prevalent belief in those parts,
and is to this day.

As soon as the boy was free of his clothes, he spread them neatly to the
sun on a big boulder, and with a whoop went skipping over the stones into
the water, till he fell full length with a splash and began swimming
vigorously seawards. The small girl sat watching him for a minute and then
skipped in after him, and the cormorants ceased their diving and the
seagulls their wheelings and mewings, and all gathered agitatedly on a rock
at the farther side of the bay, and wondered what such shouts and laughter
might portend.

But suddenly the boy broke off short in his sporting, and paddled
noiselessly, with his face straining seawards.

"What is it then, Phil? Has the big pieuvre got hold of your leg?" cried
the girl, as she splashed up towards him.

He r