Barry, emerging spluttering from one of these, said “All very jolly for you, Nan.  You’re a practised hand.  We’re being drowned.  I’m going out of it,” and he dived through another wave for the shore.  Kay, a clumsier swimmer, followed him, and Nan rode her tossing horses, laughing at them, till she was shot onto the beach and dug her fingers deep into the sucking sand.

“A very pretty landing,” said Barry, generously, rubbing his bruised limbs and coughing up water.

Gerda rose from the foam where she had been playing serenely impervious to the tauntings of Kay.

Barry said “Happy child.  She’s not filled up with salt water and battered black and blue.”

Nan remarked that neither was she, and they went to their rock crannies to dress.  They dressed and undressed in a publicity, a mixed shamelessness that was almost appalling.

They rode back to Marazion after tea along the high road, more soberly than they had come.

“Tired, Gerda?” Barry said, at the tenth mile, as they pulled up a hill.  “Hold on to me.”

Gerda refused to do so mean a thing.  She had her own sense of honour, and believed that everyone should carry his or her own burden.  But when they had to get off and walk up the hill she let him help to push her bicycle.

“Give us a few days, Nan,” said Barry, “and we’ll all be as fit as you.  At present we’re fat and scant of breath from our sedentary and useful life.”

“Our life”—­as if they had only the one between them.

At Newlyn Nan stopped.  She said she was going to supper with someone there and would come on later.  She was, in fact, tired of them.  She dropped into Stephen Lumley’s studio, which was, as usual after painting hours, full of his friends, talking and smoking.  That was the only way to spend the evening, thought Nan, talking and smoking and laughing, never pausing.  Anyhow that was the way she spent it.

She got back to Marazion at ten o’clock and went to her room at the little cafe.  Looking from its window, she saw the three on the shore by the moonlit sea.  Kay was standing on the paved causeway, and Barry and Gerda, some way off, were wading among the rocks, bending over the pools, as if they were looking for crabs.

Nan went to bed.  When Gerda came in presently, she lay very still and pretended to be asleep.

It was dreadful, another night of sharing a bed.  Dreadful to lie so close one to the other; dreadful to touch accidentally; touching people reminded you how alive they are, with their separate, conscious throbbing life so close against yours.

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