Mollie was laughing and telling Chummy not to get up. She "goes to pieces" a little in the country in the matter of dress, and wore her mallow-flower of an old sunbonnet and her gray sandshoes. As Smith reached for his stick and got up on to his feet she caught my eye and laughed again. She had suffered from big-ends and magnetos too. "Did Philip bundle you both out?" she asked. "He bundled this man out. I was behaving myself." "Well," quoth Smith, "we only gave him till twelve o'clock, and it's five to now. You coming, kids?" They were not merely coming; they were already twenty yards on the way, with Chummy pegging after them. Had Mollie and I followed, Philip would merely have commandeered us for the carrying home of his painting-tackle. Instead we turned along the cliff-tops in the opposite direction, towards the zigzag path that dropped steeply to the beach. Since that impetuous dash of hers to London she had shown herself from time to time--I will not say brooding (that is too strong a word), but frequently withdrawn, pensive, _rêveuse_. She was as brisk and practical as ever about the house or in the arranging of picnics and excursions, but somehow the routine of her daily life struck me as a series of detached and separate efforts, that for some reason or other never acquired momentum. I admit, however, that it would be easy to make too much of this change in her, if change there was. "Shall we go down?" she said as we paused at the top of the path. "I haven't seen the sands for two days. 'Man works till set of sun----'" "Come along," I said, giving her a hand; and we began the descent. The Santon sands were a rather wonderful sight that morning. The tide was at its farthest out, and some mysterious wave-action had rolled out the wide spaces, not to an even flatness, but into regular parallel striations of wet and dry, the wet so mirror-like and shining that the sky was perfectly reduplicated in it and the flight of the seabirds far under our feet could be distinctly seen, the dry portions the intervening footings from one to the next of which we stepped. Our feet left no prints on the firm surface, so that looking behind the illusion was still the same--the dry stripes, the sudden brilliant chasms in between, everywhere the interrupted inversions of blue and white and dazzling sun. "Well, I've been having my first real talk with your Chummy," I remarked as the alternations slowly flowed under our feet. "Oh? What about?" she asked. "About his aims and so on--what he wants to do. Apparently he wants to get on some sort of an Expedition. But is it likely he'll ever fly again?" "I don't know," she said; and walked a little way before adding, "I shouldn't think he'd want to." "He does."