"Then did you behave improperly?" asked Jessie. "I don't think we did really. Once we went into the shrubbery and changed clothes. At least I put on yours, but you couldn't put on mine because they were too small. That's what Browning calls 'Time's Revenges.' I couldn't put on yours now, could I? The Italian authorities would prosecute me for indecency. Lord! what a little fellow you are, Harry! Time for a little fellow to go to bed. Oh, don't rag; I never said you weren't strong. Yes, Jessie, you're strong too, and it's like a girl to pull my hair. Ah, do shut up." Archie had reasonable cause for complaint. Jessie had suddenly come behind him, and taken a great handful of touzled hair into her grasp, so that Archie's head was held immovable, while Harry tickled his ribs. You can do nothing with your arms if your head is held quite still. Presently the wicked ceased from troubling, and Archie was left alone. But after Jessie had gone to her room she stood still a moment before making herself comfortable for her nap, and then she laid across her nose and mouth the outspread hand that had grasped Archie's hair. In her fingers there remained some faint odour of warm sea-salt, and, as by a separate memory of their own, there remained in them the sense of their closing over that brown, bright, springy handful. CHAPTER VI Archie thought no more either of his tickled ribs or his outraged hair when his friends had definitely removed themselves, and with a sigh of delight he took up a sharpened pencil and a block of scribbling paper. He had grasped something, he thought, this morning, that must instantly be committed to words, before he even read over his last page or two, for his hand starved and itched to be writing. There was an odd trembling in his fingers, and his conscious brain was full of what he wanted to say. But when he put his pencil on to the block, and concentrated his mind on that liquid message of the sea that had reached him to-day, he found that his hand had nothing to write. His brain was full of what he wanted to write, but his hand disowned the controlling impulse. Again and once again he cast the thought in his brain into reasonable language, but there his hand still stayed, as if some signal was against it. Simply it would not proceed.