little pony really, though she looked such a
small, white, brittle thing.

They got out maps and schemed out roads and routes over their cigarettes.
Then they strolled about the little town, exploring its alleys and narrow
byways that gave on the sea. The moon had risen now, and Marazion was cut
steeply in shadow and silver light, and all the bay lay in shadow and
silver too, to where the lights of Penzance twinkled like a great lit
church.

Barry thought once, as he had often thought in the past, "How brilliant
Nan is, and how gay. No wonder she never needed me. She needs no one,"
and this time it did not hurt him to think it. He loved to listen to her,
to talk and laugh with her, to look at her, but he was free at last; he
demanded nothing of her. Those restless, urging, disappointed hopes and
longings lay dead in him, dead and at peace. He could not have put his
finger on the moment of their death; there had been no moment; like good
soldiers they had never died, but faded away, and till to-night he had
not known that they had gone. He would show Nan now that she need fear
no more pestering from him; she need not keep on talking without pause
whenever they were alone together, which had been her old way of defence,
and which she was beginning again now. They could drop now into
undisturbed friendship. Nan was the most stimulating of friends. It was
refreshing to talk things out with her again, to watch her quick mind
flashing and turning and cutting its way, brilliant, clear, sharp, like
a diamond.

They went to bed; Barry and Kay to the room they had got above a public
house, Nan and Gerda to Nan's room at the cafe, where they squeezed into
one bed.

Gerda slept, lying very straight and still, as was her habit in sleep.
Nan lay wakeful and restless, watching the moonlight steal across the
floor and lie palely on the bed and on Gerda's waxen face and yellow
hair. The pretty, pale child, strange in sleep, like a little mermaiden
lost on earth. Nan, sitting up in bed, one dark plait hanging over each
shoulder, watched her with brooding amber eyes. How young she was, how
very, very young. It was touching to be so young. Yet why, when youth
was, people said, the best time? It wasn't really touching to be young;
it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left.
Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty and
heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would f