"I don't know," she answered, with an absent glance at him: "it's a very dear little beach." He was willing to admit, when he landed, that it might be anything she pleased to call it, but there was chiefly wonder in his eye. The bands of tiny white and silver pebbles, and of tinier pink shells, made a floor so delicate, so incredibly dainty as seemed, in that land of legend, proof sufficient of a fairy's treading. The water lay so still and clear against it that only by the brighter tint of the covered pebbles could the margin of the sea be told, and the moving tide that swayed the weed made all along the curved strand a little whispering song, unlike any other music in the world. Lettice enjoyed Caragh's bewilderment for a moment, but stopped him as he was bringing the cable ashore. "You must moor her out," she said. "Oh, no!" he pleaded, "the tide's rising, and she'll look so jolly and so impossible nosing along the shore with all that water under her, on the very edge of an ocean." But Lettice was inflexible. The tide would be lower she said by the time they started; and Maurice had to shove the boat out again, and succeeded, after a couple of vain attempts, in jerking the anchor off her bow on to a holding bottom. "Oh, well," he said cheerfully, eyeing the result of his labour, while he unpacked the luncheon, "she looks very well out there; only I wish I'd put up the sail." "Are you quite mad to-day?" the girl asked. She sat watching him with an air of grave amusement; her feet drawn up and her hands clasped below her knees. She wore a white serge coat and skirt, with a biscuit-coloured silk shirt and a ribbon of the same shade round her sailor hat. She looked much younger than her twenty-three years, though the baby-fairness of her hair and skin were sobered by the quiet depths of her gray eyes. "I'm never mad," said Caragh to her question, holding up the red length of a lobster against the sky, "but sometimes, with you, I'm less distressingly sane than usual." Lettice, her hands fallen to her ankles, watched him sideways, with one temple resting on her knee. "That's the reflection of my foolishness, I suppose?" she said. "Possibly!" he assented; "I'm very highly polished." He was sitting with his feet towards the sea, unpacking the hamper on to a spread cloth beside him. He viewed the result appreciatively. "Two bells!" he announced to Lettice. "We're going to do ourselves well." His prediction, however, only applied to himself, for Lettice ate even less than usual; an amount, he had once declared, absurdly incompatible with her splendid air of health. She offered him no assistance in clearing up, but he showed a proper sense of his privilege, by refusing even to throw the lobster claws into the sea. Lettice smiled at the chaos of fragments he insisted on repacking. "Bridget will have ideas of your economy when she opens that," she suggested. "She'll guess perhaps that we lunched in Paradise," he said.