Like the antennae of some irritable insect it positively trembled.  Here was that woman moving—­actually going to get up—­confound her!  He struck the canvas a hasty violet-black dab.  For the landscape needed it.  It was too pale—­greys flowing into lavenders, and one star or a white gull suspended just so—­too pale as usual.  The critics would say it was too pale, for he was an unknown man exhibiting obscurely, a favourite with his landladies’ children, wearing a cross on his watch chain, and much gratified if his landladies liked his pictures—­which they often did.

“Ja—­cob!  Ja—­cob!” Archer shouted.

Exasperated by the noise, yet loving children, Steele picked nervously at the dark little coils on his palette.

“I saw your brother—­I saw your brother,” he said, nodding his head, as Archer lagged past him, trailing his spade, and scowling at the old gentleman in spectacles.

“Over there—­by the rock,” Steele muttered, with his brush between his teeth, squeezing out raw sienna, and keeping his eyes fixed on Betty Flanders’s back.

“Ja—­cob!  Ja—­cob!” shouted Archer, lagging on after a second.

The voice had an extraordinary sadness.  Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks—­so it sounded.

Steele frowned; but was pleased by the effect of the black—­it was just that note which brought the rest together.  “Ah, one may learn to paint at fifty!  There’s Titian...” and so, having found the right tint, up he looked and saw to his horror a cloud over the bay.

Mrs. Flanders rose, slapped her coat this side and that to get the sand off, and picked up her black parasol.

The rock was one of those tremendously solid brown, or rather black, rocks which emerge from the sand like something primitive.  Rough with crinkled limpet shells and sparsely strewn with locks of dry seaweed, a small boy has to stretch his legs far apart, and indeed to feel rather heroic, before he gets to the top.

But there, on the very top, is a hollow full of water, with a sandy bottom; with a blob of jelly stuck to the side, and some mussels.  A fish darts across.  The fringe of yellow-brown seaweed flutters, and out pushes an opal-shelled crab—­

“Oh, a huge crab,” Jacob murmured—­and begins his journey on weakly legs on the sandy bottom.  Now!  Jacob plunged his hand.  The crab was cool and very light.  But the water was thick with sand, and so, scrambling down, Jacob was about to jump, holding his bucket in front of him, when he saw, stretched entirely rigid, side by side, their faces very red, an enormous man and woman.

An enormous man and woman (it was early-closing day) were stretched motionless, with their heads on pocket-handkerchiefs, side by side, within a few feet of the sea, while two or three gulls gracefully skirted the incoming waves, and settled near their boots.