The young man looked at her suspiciously and then took his oars. “I hope your island is quite near,” said Priscilla, “For if it isn’t you’re not likely to get there. Were you ever in a boat before?” The young man pulled a few strokes and got his boat into the channel beyond the red perches. “I think,” said Priscilla, “that you might say ‘thank you,’ Only for me you’d have been left stranded on that rock till the tide rose again and floated you off somewhere between four and five o’clock this afternoon.” “Thank you,” said the young man, “thank you very much indeed.” “But where are you going?” The question seemed to frighten him. He began to row with desperate energy. In a few minutes he was far down the channel. Priscilla watched him. Then she swam to her bay, pushed the Blue Wanderer a little further from the shore and landed. The island of Delginish is a pleasant spot on a warm day. Above its gravel beach rises a slope of coarse short grass, woven through with wild thyme and yellow crowtoe. Sea-pinks cluster on the fringe of grass and delicate groups of fairy-flax are bright-blue in stony places. Red centaury and yellow bed-straw and white bladder campion flourish. Tiny wild roses, clinging to the ground, fleck the green with spots of vivid white. The sun reaches every yard of the shadeless surface of the island. Here and there grey rocks peep up, climbed over, mellowed by olive green stonecrops. Priscilla, glowing from her bath, lay full stretch among the flowers, drawing deep breaths of scented air and gazing at the sky. But nothing was further from her mind than soulful sentimentalising over the beauties of nature. She was puzzling about the young man who had left her, endeavoring to arrive at some theory of who he was and what he could be doing in Rosnacree. After awhile she turned over on her side, fumbled in her pocket and drew out two more biscuits in crumbly fragments. She munched them contentedly. At eleven o’clock she raised herself slowly on one elbow and looked round. The tide had nearly reached its lowest, and the Blue Wanderer lay half in, half out of the water; her stern perched high, her bow with the useless anchor rope depending from it, dipped deep. Priscilla realised that she had no time to lose. She put her shoulder to the stern of the boat and pushed, springing on board as the boat floated. The Blue Wanderer, even with her new lug sail, does not work well to windward. It is possible by very careful steering to make a little by tacking if the breeze is good and the tide is running favourably. With a light wind and in the slack water of the ebb the most that can be done is not to go to leeward. Priscilla, with the necessity of meeting a train present in her mind, unstepped the mast and took her oars. In twenty minutes she was alongside the slip where Peter Walsh stood waiting for her. “I was talking to Joseph Anthony Kinsella,” he said, “since you were out--him that lives beyond in Inishbawn.”