ppy sea danced and beat, the great tumbling sea on which
she would soon put out her boat.

She would count the days before Barry would be with her.

"Three weeks now. Twenty days; nineteen, eighteen..." desiring neither to
hurry nor to retard them, but watching them slip behind her in a deep
content. When he came, he and Gerda and Kay, they would spend one night
and one day in this fishing-town, lounging about its beach, and in
Newlyn, with its steep crooked streets between old grey walls hung with
shrubs, and beyond Newlyn, in the tiny fishing hamlets that hung above
the little coves from Penzance to Land's End. They were going to bicycle
all along the south coast. But before that they would have had it out,
she and Barry; probably here, in the little pale climbing fishing-town.
No matter where, and no matter how; Nan cared nothing for scenic
arrangements. All she had to do was to convey to Barry that she would
say yes now to the question she had put off and off, let him ask it,
give her answer, and the thing would be done.

2

Meanwhile she wrote the last chapters of her book, sitting on the beach
among drying nets and boats, in some fishing cove up the coast. The
Newlyn shore she did not like, because the artist-spoilt children crowded
round her, interrupting.

"Lady, lady! Will you paint us?"

"No. I don't paint."

"Then what _are_ you doing?"

"Writing. Go away."

"May we come with you to where you're staying?"

"No. Go away."

"Last year a lady took us to her studio and gave us pennies. And when
she'd gone back to London she sent us each a doll."

Silence.

"Lady, if we come with you to your studio, will you give us pennies?"

"No. Why should I?"

"You might because you wanted to paint us. You might because you liked
us."

"I don't do either. Go away now."

They withdrew a little and turned somersaults, supposing her to be
watching. The artistic colony had a lot to answer for, Nan thought; they
were making parasites and prostitutes of the infant populace. Children
could at their worst be detestable in their vanity, their posing, their
affectation, their unashamed greed.

"Barry's and mine," she thought (I suppose we'll have some), "shall at
least not pose. They may break all the commandments, but if they turn
somersaults to be looked at I shall drop them into a public creche and
abandon them."

The prettiest little girl looked sidelong at the unkind lady, and
believed her half-smile to