He lay on his couch, pillowing his head with an arm, a cigarette in the free hand. Now and then he noticed himself smoking it. The morning streamed in through the window behind him and splashed light, and the delicate shadows of leaves, on the wall before his eyes. Once he remembered how a sunbeam, spearing through a sky roiled and black with oncoming rain, had flamed from crest to crest along the ocean; he watched the sun's shining feet stride past him. But there followed an M which staggered among hideous winds, it spoke of Morna and Margery and the Moon. He spent a long time wondering why M stood for the Moon until he remembered Hecate, in whose jaws he lived. M was also for Machiavelli, a Moldering skull which knew somewhat of Murder. But all this was not important, it was Morbid and he only played with it on the surface, as if it were spindrift driven by that wind he knew. In the ocean of his damnation there were green Miles, which became black as you went downward, drank all sunlight and ate drowned folk. This, however, was natural and right, life unto life and he could wish no better ending for himself than to breathe the sea. It must be remembered, though, that Morna was only thirteen years old. She reached for him through a shattering burst of water. He could not hear if she screamed, the wind made such a haro, but a wave picked her up and threw her backward and growled. He saw her long hair flutter in its white, blowing mane. Then dark violence rolled over him. He stirred, and felt that his cigarette had gone so short it would burn his fingers. A part of him suggested he let it, but he ground the butt out in an ashtray on the floor. What he was would not be lessened by a few blisters, he thought. It was not that he accepted guilt (he told the morning gulls on the reef, among sharded timbers). It was that he was damned, without a God or a Devil to judge him: it was merely in the nature of things that he did nothing well. Morna should drown and Margery should drown--the human body held that much blood--because--_no_, said the seed of survival within him, not because it was his fault. And was there anything more irrelevant than the question of his guilt or innocence? The sole fact that mattered was: Morna, thirteen years old, hauled down under the sea and rolled across a barnacled reef. He had found her washed up the next morning, before the boat came out to rescue him. A strand of hair still clung in place, darkened by water but more bright than the coral. He saw some of the bones; a tiny crab ran out of her eye socket. Kintyre hung onto the couch through a whiteness that hummed.