And to all their questioning life could give them as yet this answer alone. The other answers would work themselves out through the veiled years, slowly, painfully perhaps. It was, then, a triumphant thing to have one possession safe for all time--one thing that the inscrutable years, and failure and joy and tears, could not touch; one thing, in a world of uncertain values, that the flames of the crucible would not at all transmute. It was, in fine, an admirable thing that they had one another to sail boats with. Tommy was throwing stones, with his left hand, after his boat, with intent to hasten it. In the long run, even taking into account undoubted occasional successes, experience goes to show that this is not really a very useful thing to do, even when the right hand is used. Tommy's boat presently was struck and capsized. 'All right,' Tommy observed. 'Yours isn't going to come in to shore by itself--you needn't think it. We'll have a bombardment.... Mine was a rotten boat.... If I couldn't make a better boat than that.... There, that's got it. Now they can race in upside down. C-come round and get them.' The race in upside down was a leisurely process. The owners got bored at last, and decided to abandon the crafts, which remained bobbing together upside down, twin derelicts far from the shore. Out of the shadowed green pine-gloom the Crevequers came up again on to the steep, climbing hill-path, whose stones were hot with the evening sunshine. The warm still air was sweet with the pines, salt with the breath of the sea below. From up here, looking down through the silver-grey screen of the olives, one saw all the little bay lying, golden with the sunset, the sea stretching level and limpid, blue as evening, between jutting points, the fishing-city, pink and yellow and white, curving round it, set close on the still, clear, tideless edge, that was as a lake's margin, lifted by no ripple, but having for waves a soft soundless sway to and fro. The Crevequers loved this waveless evening sea. Betty gave a little sigh of content, and slipped her hand into Tommy's. 'Come on,' she said, 'l-let's run down, and get r-really hot, then we'll go and upset ourselves out of the canoe. What fun.' They did so. THE END BY THE SAME AUTHOR ABBOTS VERNEY 'A fine novel.'--_Review of Reviews._ 'A novel of great promise.'--_Sheffield Telegraph._ 'A clever book--unusually so; a thoughtful, judicious, well-developed book, full of interesting people.'--_Daily Chronicle._ 'A singularly clever novel.'--_Truth._ '"Abbots Verney" has charm and distinction ... an unusually capable book.'--_Morning Post._ 'Far above the common run of novels.'--_Literary World._ 'A notably sound, original, and well-constructed story.'--_Birmingham Post._ 'The characters are realized vividly and with insight; the story, which is carefully written and full of interest, is unfolded with no little skill.'--_Bookman._