“No, thank—I mean, no, not him,” said Billy. “Some French people you haven’t met yet. They’re touring North Wales in their car. He’s a man I’ve had a good deal to do with in business.” “And _she_——” began Theo, stopping uncharacteristically short as her brother went on, tapping a letter he held. “I’ve just heard from him that they’re in Holyhead now, and coming over here to look us up this afternoon. So that puts a stopper on our plan of painting that figure-head for Mrs. Roberts after lunch. We’ll have to see if we can get it done this morning instead. Good thing I got that paint last night at the wheelwright’s. Are you on, Nancy? Then, if you’re ready, we’ll start now, shall we?” “Blanche and I don’t think we’ll come, thank you,” said Theodora punctiliously. “What, not until you’re asked?” laughed her brother, rummaging for the paint-pots under the southernwood bush at the cottage door. He gave me one pot and the brushes to carry, taking the other two himself. “Well, good-bye, all!” “Come back, then, Cariad!” called Blanche, but the little white dog frisked unheedingly in circles ahead of us, across the shingle at the edge of the cove, over a couple of sand-hills, then up the steps cut in the turf of the cliff where the Roberts have set up a flagstaff and the wooden woman. * * * * * She’d been the figure-head of the _Gwladys Pritchard_, Mrs. Roberts had told us, which had been wrecked in the bay below, many years ago; the name and the face alike having been copied from the real girl who was “cariad” to the owner of the vessel. “She must have been pretty,” I thought, the first time I climbed the cliff. For many coats of paint, roughly applied, could not spoil or disguise the setting of the carved girl’s eyes, nor the tender oval of the up-tilted chin, nor the lines of the neck flowing down into the sloping shoulders and the figure held up in an unmodern curve above the corset of the Sixties, which must have set the fashion of Miss Pritchard’s dress. She wore a little jacket with basques and epaulettes and shoulder-seams set far down the sleeves; and a tiny pork-pie hat, trimmed with a wing, was perched upon her hair, which had been last painted yellow as the gorse that grew in hummocks all around her. The jacket had been white, with trimmings of emerald green; the same green, too, plastered the hat and the wooden nosegay which she held up against her breast. Yet, for all this crude green-and-white, for all the untaught modelling of it, there was a vitality about this graven image which I’d never seen in any statue. Was it because it had once been part of that live thing, a ship? I could picture that image of a slender girl, leaning breast forward again from the prow of her lover’s vessel as she heaved and dipped like a gull on the waves; scanning horizons, joyously riding the gale, and free to sea and sky!