They too made a shining _coup d'oeil_. There was just swell enough to set the long breakers hurdling in, and wind enough to take the tops off them in rattling showers of brilliant spray. Indeed it was so merry a sea that, not half an hour before, Mrs. Maynard had declared to John Willie that she had come within an ace of drowning during her bathe that morning, and had asked him whether, had he seen her in difficulties, he would have come to her rescue. "Mmmmm, John Willie?" she had asked, curling his hair with her perfumed fingers; but John Willie, seeing Percy Briggs approaching, had jerked away his head. This had not been because he had been afraid of being laughed at by Percy. For that matter, Percy had confided to John Willie only a week before that he "liked their Minetta," and so was in no position to jeer at the softer relations. No; it had merely been that, as Llanyglo's curtain had risen, suddenly revealing a soft and alluring group of Euonymas and Wygelias and Hildas, not to speak of Mrs. Maynard herself, all temptingly set out like fruit upon a stall, the curtain of John Willie Garden's peculiar privacy had come down with a run. Mrs. Maynard was always trying to peep behind it, but probably there was nothing behind. Probably that was the reason it had come so sharply and closely down. No boy wants to show that he has nothing to show. Smack!--A bucketful of spray drenched the stores, and the wave ran hissing and creaming back under the counter of the blue-and-white boat. John Willie shouted rather crossly to Eesaac Oliver. "Pull her up a bit, can't you, instead of standing there doing nothing!" Eesaac Oliver started to life and obeyed. He was rather a fetcher and carrier for these more happily circumstanced boys, but privately he knew himself to be in some things their superior. To tell the truth, Eesaac Oliver knew just a lee-tle too much about what went on within himself, and communicated it just a lee-tle too readily to others. For he dropped no curtain; on the contrary, the windows of his soul were flung wide open. The experience of the world he had acquired at the school at Porth Neigr had already caused him to declare himself as being thenceforward powerfully on the side of the angels; and that ingenious educational exercise which consists of speaking extempore on any subject given only a moment ago had a lee-tle abnormally developed certain natural powers of expression which his race rarely lacks. Had Mrs. Maynard attempted to stroke Eesaac Oliver's hair (which was thick and black, and rose in a great lump in front, falling thence in a lappet over his pale forehead), he would either have cried "Apage!" or else, suffering the seduction, would have undergone torments of remorse afterwards. Therefore it was with a meek dignity that Eesaac Oliver bore a hand with the boat, and then fell back and a little enviously watched again.