e up with
us."

For in fact they could see quite near them now Captain Beausire as
he came down, backward, so as to give both hands to Mme. Roland; and
further up, further off, Roland still letting himself slip, lowering
himself on his hams and clinging on with his hands and elbows at
the speed of a tortoise, Pierre keeping in front of him to watch his
movements.

The path, now less steep, was here almost a road, zigzagging between the
huge rocks which had at some former time rolled from the hill-top. Mme.
Rosemilly and Jean set off at a run and they were soon on the beach.
They crossed it and reached the rocks, which stretched in a long and
flat expanse covered with sea-weed, and broken by endless gleaming
pools. The ebbed waters lay beyond, very far away, across this plain of
slimy weed, of a black and shining olive green.

Jean rolled up his trousers above his calf, and his sleeves to his
elbows, that he might get wet without caring; then saying: "Forward!" he
leaped boldly into the first tide-pool they came to.

The lady, more cautious, though fully intending to go in too, presently,
made her way round the little pond, stepping timidly, for she slipped on
the grassy weed.

"Do you see anything?" she asked.

"Yes, I see your face reflected in the water."

"If that is all you see, you will not have good fishing."

He murmured tenderly in reply:

"Of all fishing it is that I should like best to succeed in."

She laughed: "Try; you will see how it will slip through your net."

"But yet--if you will?"

"I will see you catch prawns--and nothing else--for the moment."

"You are cruel--let us go a little farther, there are none here."

He gave her his hand to steady her on the slippery rocks. She leaned on
him rather timidly, and he suddenly felt himself overpowered by love and
insurgent with passion, as if the fever that had been incubating in him
had waited till to-day to declare its presence.

They soon came to a deeper rift, in which long slender weeds,
fantastically tinted, like floating green and rose-coloured hair, were
swaying under the quivering water as it trickled off to the distant sea
through some invisible crevice.

Mme. Rosemilly cried out: "Look, look, I see one, a big one. A very
big one, just there!" He saw it too, and stepped boldly into the pool,
though he got wet up to the waist. But the creature, waving its long
whiskers, gently retired in front of the net. Jean drove it towards the