The three left behind adjusted themselves, as friends can do, to their narrowed circle, and moved sensibly closer to each other. They all had their tasks to sweeten the enjoyment of their leisure, for to Jessie fell the Martha-cares of the house, which she transacted by the aid of an Italian dictionary with the cook Assunta; to Harry Travers, now a junior don at Cambridge, the preparation of a course of history lectures next term; to Archie the incessant practice in the endless and elusive art of writing prose. The love of expressing what he loved in words was no less than a passion with him, and it is almost needless to add that the sea was his inspiring theme. He certainly had the prime essential of devotion both to his subject and to the technique of his art, and these little essays, called _Idylls of the Sea_, promised, if ever he could persuade himself to finish them, to be a really exquisite piece of work. They were the simplest sketches of fishers and ships and the like, but to satisfy him, the sea had to sound in every line of them, even as it sounded in the ears of those about whom he wrote. Just now he was trying to recapture all that had made the ecstasy to him of that risky voyage homewards across the bay a few days before, and to fire his words with that thrill which he never quite despaired of communicating. As a rule, their day arranged itself very regularly: early breakfast was succeeded by a couple of hours of task, and a couple more were spent in bathing, no affair of hurried undressing, of chilly immersion and a huddling on of clothes, but of long baskings on the shore, and a mile-long ploughing, for Archie at least, out into the bay or along the coast and round beyond the furthest promontory. Much though he liked the companionship of the others, he was never sorry when first Jessie, and then Harry turned shorewards again, for the companionship of the sea was closest to him when he was alone. He would burrow his way through it on the sidestroke, buried in the foam of his progress, and, when exhausted and breathless, turn on to his back to be cradled and rocked by it, secure in its enveloping presence, even as in the days of childhood he would lie happy and serene in the knowledge that Blessington was close by him. Or he would dive deep and see through "the fallen day" the dazzle of the sun of the surface far above him, and then swim up again, and, after the greenness and the paleness below, find a red and glowing firmament. But best of all was it to swim out very far from land, and then just exist with arms and legs spread wide, encompassed and surrounded by mere sea. He did not want to think about anything at all, or to belabour his brain with strivings to cast into words the sea-sense; that would come afterwards, when with gnawed pencil and erased sentences he sat in the garden; but he only opened himself out to it, and drank it in through eye and ear and skin and widespread limbs...