Had Jane uttered a cry, her children were lost. Shelley might made a sudden movement, the bark would capsize, the waters wrap them round as a winding-sheet. . . . Suppressing her terror, she answered promptly, “No, thank you, not now, I should like my dinner first and so would the children. . . . And look, there is Edward coming on shore with Trelawny . . . they’ll be so surprised at our being out at this time, and Edward says this boat is not safe.” “Safe!” cried the Poet, “I’d go to Leghorn or anywhere in her.” Jane felt that the Angel of Death, who always attended the Poet on the water, now spread his wings and vanished. “You haven’t yet written the words for the Indian air,” she said carelessly. “Yes, I have,” he answered, “but you must play me the air again, and I’ll try and make the thing better.” Meanwhile he had paddled his cockleshell into shallow water; as soon as Jane saw the sandy bottom, she snatched up her babies, and clambered out so hurriedly that the punt was turned over and the Poet pinned down underneath it. He rose with it on his back, like a hermit-crab in any old empty shell. “Jane, are you mad?” cried her husband, surprised at her lubberly way of getting out of a boat. “Had you waited a moment, we would have hauled the boat up.” “No, thank you. Oh, I have escaped the most dreadful fate! Never will I put my foot in that horrid coffin again. ‘Solve the great mystery!’ . . . Why, he is the greatest of all mysteries! Who can predict what he will do? . . . He is seeking after what we all avoid—death. I wish we were away. I shall always be in terror.” But the Poet’s boyish face wore its accustomed innocent and radiant expression. During this glorious summer, nothing seemed able to mar his joy. Of an evening he liked to go sailing in the _Ariel_ by moonlight. Mary sitting at his feet, her head against his knees, remembered how she had sat thus on the stormy cross-channel journey ten years ago. Ten years . . . what quantities of things had happened in ten years. How much subtler, crueller, and more treacherous Life had been, than either of them had then imagined.