In this wise we talked; then, there being two hours of daylight left, I put on my hat and jacket and, taking my lover's arm, went with him slowly down the great gap in the cliffs to the seashore. It was sheltered down here. The yellow sunshine lay upon the brown sand, and flashed in the lifting lengths of seaweed writhing amidst the surf, and had a sense of April warmth, though it was a keen wind that then blew--a northerly wind, strong, with a hurry of white clouds like endless flocks of sheep, scampering southwards. The sands made a noble promenade, surf-furrowed and hard as wood; the breakers tumbled close beside us with a loud roar of thunder, and exquisite was the picture of the trending cliffs, snowclad, gleaming with a delicate moonlike light in the pale airy blue distance. All sights and sounds of sky and sea appealed to me now with a meaning I had never before found in them. I would stop my lover as we walked, to observe the swift and beautiful miracle of the moulding of a breaker as it arched out of the troubled brine, soaring, into a snowstorm, arching headlong to the sands with the foam flying from its rushing peak like white feathers streaming from a dazzling line of helmets; and once or twice as we talked, I would pause to mark the flight of the gulls stemming the wind aslant in curves of beauty, or sailing seawards on level, tremorless wings, and flinging a salt ocean song with their short raw cries through the harsh bass and storming accompaniment of the surf. 'If the breeze does not make me strong here, why should the sea make me strong elsewhere?' I said. 'It is the change. I have heard of desperate cases made well by travel.' 'It is hard! To think that my health should force me to that!' I exclaimed, pointing to a little vessel that had rounded out of a point two miles distant, and was lifting the white seas to the level of her bows as she sank and soared before the fresh wind, every sail glowing like a star, her rigging gleaming like golden wire, her decks sparkling when she inclined them towards us, as though the glass and brass about her were rubies and diamonds. 'I wonder if she will ever return, Archie?' 'Why not? Cheer up, dearest.' We watched her till she had shrunk into a little square of dim orange, with the freckled green running in hardening ridges southwards, where the shadow of the early February evening was deepening like smoke, making the ocean distance past the sail look as wide again to the imagination as the truth was. I shuddered and involuntarily pressed my lover's arm. 'The wind is too cold for you,' he said, and we slowly returned home up through the great split in the cliff amongst whose hollows and shoulders the roar of the surf was echoed back in quick, sudden, intermittent notes like the sound of guns at sea.