To the right the castle blocked the blue sky, shutting the little bay. Across the wide waters to the east Pozzuoli loomed, transparent, jutting into the sea. Further, more transparent, delicately purple, Nisida seemed moored like a barge, with the point of Coroglio behind it. Coroglio shut the gulf, so that one could not see how behind it the bay swept down and ran to Naples. Naples was beyond the picture; the picture held only the blue January morning, with its glittering waters and brown sails and purple points and islands, and little waves that spurtled on warm sand, and behind the bells of Baja calling. There was also the salt smell of the sea, and the Crevequers, and their sand castle. These things, to Betty Crevequer, became suddenly, as Mrs. Venables would have said, very real, very vivid--in a manner all of life. She lay dreamily, her eyes narrowed to slits blue as the sea, absorbing the impression. Worded--but she did not word it now--it was, as she had put it, 'Naples is there, and you and I are out here.' Naples, set pink and white upon her shores, beyond the point, out of the picture, was life; and life, some one had said, was a smelting-furnace, a testing of ultimate values. Betty seemed to dream a dream--a dream of the testing of values by fire. She saw how it might be that metal ran away, melting in the flames ... how one might be cast up out of the fiery pit, taking with one the knowledge of pure gold, for what that wisdom might be worth. But perhaps also a little piece of it to keep--if one was fortunate. And Betty shuddered at this vision of purging by fire, and at the 'mental standpoint' of the man who had conceived life so. One should be allowed to keep one's bright metal--gold or dross, it mattered little; one should be allowed to keep it to play with, not looking into its quality avariciously. There should be a ring set round it to guard it from the flames which might melt it away in one's hands. The melting of it would so horribly burn one's hands; and then there would be a blankness, and nothing left to play with any more. It was at this moment that the 'impression' became of a great vividness. Life might be a furnace, but here were things untouched by its flame, cast up--so Betty saw them, with prospective eyes--out of the sea of fire on to the high shores. Here, by the edge of the sea, were she and Tommy and a sand-castle dotted with pumice-stone like a plum-pudding.... A swift moment of vivid intuition came to her, illuminating her vision of life, as she looked at Tommy, lying on his back, with his straw hat tilted over his eyes. She was lit by a flash of great certainty, of strange discernment. The flash passed, and left her as one who wakes from a trance. She lay and looked at Tommy, and, looking, felt a desire for speech. 'I'm thinking, Tommy, that you're very lucky to have me to play with you, and that I'm rather lucky to have you to play with me.'