en in another, after being dragged painfully along rough and
dangerous ways. And over and above and beyond all this, beyond rivalry
and beyond Gerda, was the eternal impatience for adventure as such, for
quick, vehement living, which was the essence of Nan. She found things
more fun that way: that summed it.

6

The long strange days slid by like many-coloured dreams. The steep
tumbling roads tilted behind them, with their pale, old, white and slate
hamlets huddled between fields above a rock-bound sea. Sometimes they
would stop early in the day at some fishing village, find rooms there for
the night, and bathe and sail till evening. When they bathed, Nan would
swim far out to sea, striking through cold, green, heaving waters,
slipping cleverly between currents, numbing thought with bodily action,
drowning emotion in the sea.

Once they were all caught in a current and a high sea and swept out, and
had to battle for the shore. Even Nan, even Barry, could not get to the
cove from which they had bathed; all they could try for was the jut of
rocks to westward toward which the seas were sweeping, and to reach this
meant a tough fight.

"Barry!"

Nan, looking over her shoulder, saw Gerda's bluing face and wide staring
eyes and quickening, flurried strokes. Saw, too, Barry at once at her
side, heard his "All right, I'm here. Catch hold of my shoulder."

In a dozen strokes Nan reached them, and was at Gerda's other side.

"Put one hand on each of us and strike for all you're worth with your
legs. That's the way...."

Numbly Gerda's two hands gripped Barry's right shoulder and Nan's left.
Between them they pulled her, her slight weight dragging at them heavily,
helping the running sea against them. They were being swept westward
towards the rocks, but swept also outwards, beyond them; they struck
northward and northward and were carried always south. It was a close
thing between their swimming and the current, and it looked as though the
current was winning.

"It'll have to be all we know now," said Nan, as they struggled ten yards
from the point.

She and Barry both rather thought that probably it would be all they knew
and just the little more they didn't know--they would be swept round the
point well to the south of the outermost rock--and then, hey for open
sea!

But their swimming proved, in this last fierce minute of the struggle,
stronger than the sea. They were swept towards the jutting point, almost
ro