They passed out between the coral and the sea-fans, entered the surrey, and it drove on. Now they were back by the sea. The tide was far out, the expanse of shallows vaster. The salt pools had been fired by the torch of the sky; they lay in reds and purples, wonderful. The smell of the sea impregnated the air and there blew a whispering wind. The town began to appear, straggling out to meet them, low chimneyless houses of the poorer sort. Men and women were out in the twilight, and children calling to one another and playing. The vivid lights had faded from sky and from wet sand and rock, shoal and lagoon, but colour was left, though it was the ghost of itself. It swam in the air, it gleamed from the earth. Warmth was there, too, and languor, and the melancholy of the gathering night. A dreamlike quality came into things--the children's voices sounded faint and far; only there were waves of some faint odour, coming now it seemed from gardens.... Now they were in the town and the sea was shut away. "One half of my fairy month is gone." "You are sleeping better?" "Yes--much better.... Where shall we go to-morrow?" "Leave it to to-morrow. Look at the star ... oh, beauty!" When to-morrow was here they walked inland to Fort Fincastle, and then to the Queen's Staircase. Negro children raced after them with some sweet-smelling yellow flower in their hands. "Penny, Boss!--Penny, Boss!--Penny, Boss!" When they were gone, and when two surreys filled with white-dressed hotel people vanished likewise, they had the Queen's Staircase to themselves. Broad-stepped, cut in the living rock, it plunged downward to the green bottom of the seventy-foot deep ancient quarry. Trees overhung it and yellow flowers, and there was a rich, green light like the bottom of the sea. Denny and Hagar sat upon a step a quarter of the way down.