“Well,” she laughed, “I’m dirty,” displaying her small square-fingered hands glittering in the sun with sharp points of sand, for they had been making castles in the cove; “I’m dirty, but I’m not filthy.” The glowing September warmth, and Ursula’s initiative, had led her to abandon her thick knitted sweaters, and to wear instead a short-sleeved butcher-blue jumper. Her thin brown legs were bare and also sandy, stretched carelessly from the shelter of her wriggled-up old skirt. Her skin was golden velvet where the glinting ladders of sunset fell across it. It was an oddly fascinating Pierrot-face turned up towards Doug, all bloom and roundness and impudence. “You’re sticky with sand,” he informed her abruptly. “’M. I know. It sticks to me. Good thing I’ve got hair like a boy, or it would be a mass of sand.” “Why don’t you wear it short, but hanging soft and square round your cheeks, like girls do?” “Mine only grows this shape,” despondently. “Poor little penny bun. Never mind--I like it.” He looked down upon her tenderly ... and cried out, in a harsh voice quite different from his own: “You _know_, Chris!”... At that moment Louis Gregson sauntered round an adjacent haycock. “Hullo, old man,” cried Doug, who could never help being convivial, even to an intruder interrupting a scene which was obviously leading up to what Ursula called the lagoon speech.... Louis nodded to him, sat down beside Chris, and in his cheap, deft, confidential fashion, caused her at once to feel especially feminine, each bit of her separately, and all at once. She contrasted his carefully preserved dark moustache, his slight dapper figure, and eyes that were narrow and knowing, with her splendid Doug, tanned, athletic and burly, his boyish speeches blurted out heedless of consequences, his record as a wanderer and a scapegrace and a man of action. And because she was exulting in Doug, and her eyes hazed by magic, she did not understand that the epicure’s treatment of her as a slight but not untantalizing Deauville episode, was in the least insulting. Directly he left them: “Why do you let that bounder speak to you?” demanded Doug sternly. “_Is_ he a bounder?” in musing innocence. “I didn’t _let_ him speak to me. He spoke.” They quarrelled after that. And Doug went off sailing for the evening, and came home laden with mackerel and stiff with brine. His talk at late supper was spattered with fishing and ferocious weather technicalities, and well dashed with dialect. And afterwards, when he and Ursula went upstairs, he crushed strong arms around her and broke out: “I’m fed up with this farming business, Teddy. Let’s run away--just you and me--and breed dogs on the Yorkshire moors.” She brooded thoughtfully for a moment ... and a little sigh shook her. Doug imagined it was a sigh of longing. “Teddy,” he whispered, “tell me what you’re thinking of. Let’s be all in all to each other again.”