And presently, whether she took the hint or whether she had come precisely for that purpose, Belle's greenish-brown eyes roved again, she made a slight gesture to Ynys, who had turned from the butterfly-nets and was looking out to sea, and the pair of them made off along the beach in the direction of that bright plot of colour that made as it were a herbaceous border between the grey-green tussocks and the glittering sea. For a hundred yards Belle's dug-outs left behind her a heavy shuffling track in the sand, parallel with the light kidney-shaped prints of the child who walked as if she carried an invisible pitcher on her head; and then, with the cluster of tents and parasols still far ahead, they stopped. John Willie Garden and Percy Briggs, with Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd ready to bear a hand if called upon to do so, but otherwise a little fearful of intruding, were victualling the blue-and-white collapsible boat for a cruise. But it was not in order to tell the fortunes of the three boys that Belle stopped. She stopped for the same reason that the street-seller pulls out his rattle or his conjuring trick, while his quick-silver eyes dart this way and that in search of his crowd. The only difference was that Belle was her own conjuring-trick. The gesture with which she performed it was superbly negligent. She had a wonderful old mignonette-coloured shawl, which, when she had talked with the group about Mrs. Roberts's doorstep, had been drawn up over her head; and suddenly she allowed it to fall to her shoulders. The effect might well have carried twice the distance it was intended to carry. Out of the folds of the shawl her neck rose as erect as the pistil of an arum lily. Against it gleamed her heavy gold earrings. Her cheekbones and the nodule of her high nose gleamed like bronze, and about the whorl of the springing of her hair at the back of her head the sunshine made as it were a sun-dog on the lustrous blackness. Her silver wedding-ring, an old tweed jacket that might have belonged to her kinsman Dafydd Dafis, and a patched old indigo petticoat, completed the legerdemain. Ynys, clad to all appearances in a single garment only, watched the boys exactly as she had watched the balls and butterfly-nets and buckets outside Howell Gruffydd's shop.