He drew himself up slowly, and hung for a moment while the water poured out of his clothes.  Then, with a heave and a wild kick in the air, he was aboard, and turned to assist his companion.  He grasped the little brown hands and braced his foot against the gunwale.  “Now!” and she came up over the side like a lovely white elf, and sank panting among the golden-brown coils of vraic.

“It was silly of you to jump in there, you know,” said the boy over his shoulder, as he sat down to his oars and headed for Pierre au Norman again.  “The Race is too strong for you.  I’ve told you so before.”

“You do it yourself,” she panted.

“I’m a boy and I’m stronger than you.”

“I can swim as fast as you.”

“But I can last longer, and the Race is too strong for me sometimes.”

“B’en!  I knew you’d pick me up.”

“Well, don’t you ever do it when I’m not here, or some day the black snake will get you and you’ll never come up again.”

He was pulling steadily now through the backwater of Havre Gosselin;—­past the iron clamps let into the face of the rock, up and down which the fishermen climbed like flies;—­past the moored boats;—­avoiding hidden rocks by the instinct of constant usage, till his boat slid up among the weed-cushioned boulders of the shore, and he drew in his oars and laid them methodically along the thwarts.

The small girl jumped out and wallowed in the warm lip of the tide, and finally squatted in it with her brown hands clasped round her pink-white knees,—­unabashed, unashamed, absolutely innocent of any possible necessity for either,—­as lovely a picture as all those coasts could show.

Her long hair, dark with the water, hung in wet rats’ tails on her slim white shoulders, which were just flushed with the nip of the sea.  The clear drops sparkled on her pretty brown face like pearls and diamonds, and seemed loth to fall.  Her little pink toes curled up out of the creamy wash to look at her.

“Where are your things?” asked the boy.

“In the cave yonder.”

“Go and get dressed,” he said, looking down at her with as little thought of unseemliness as she herself.

“Not at all.  I’m quite warm.”

“Well, I’m going to dry my things,” and he began to wriggle out of his knitted blue guernsey.  “Also,” he said, following up a previous train of thought, “let me tell you there are devil-fish about here.  One came up with one of our pots yesterday.”

“Pooh!  I killed one with a stick this morning.  They’re only baby ones; comme ca,” and she measured about two inches between her little pink palms.

“This one was so big,” and he indicated a yard or so, between the flapping sleeves of the guernsey in which his head was still involved.

“I don’t believe you, Phil Carre,” she said with wide eyes.  “You’re just trying to frighten me.”

“All right!  Just you wait till one catches hold of your leg when you’re out swimming all by yourself.  If I’d known you’d be so silly I’d never have taught you.”