She sat often at the rocky beach, generally in the long evening and night hours. The sea lay before her; lapping at the rocks, far out and down the slope from where once had been a shore-front. A dark area out there, unnaturally low--the ocean lying with the starlight upon it. The rocky headlines of the coast stood with naked black roots exposed. Polly says that she could notice the drift of the water, like a river slowly moving southward. And each night--each morning when she came out to stare at it--the water was lower, its shore edge farther out and farther down, more of the rocky slope laid bare. The coast headlands and outer rocks began to seem peaks upstanding from this new realm of land. Two rocks to the north, which once had been mere points above the water, now were joined down at their dark roots--twin spires at the top of a widening elevation of tumbled slimy rock. The smell of the rotting sea had been heavy along the coast under the daylight sun; vaporous like a miasma rolled up from the exposed slopes. A mist clung heavy upon the water which only the sun at noon could dispel. A north wind, the night of the 18th, brought a clearer air. By midnight it was cold--as though this wind had come whirling from the Arctic. And with it fell a torrential downpour--tropical in force--cold enough to suggest that it might have snow coming behind it. Polly stood on the upper balcony. Black downpour--driving wind. And overhead she noticed a heavy, luminous green murk. Nature was abnormal, disturbed everywhere. She went indoors. The radio announcer was reeling off reports of the storm. South Greenland, Labrador, and all the north of Quebec Province were enveloped in a blizzard. There was a report that the water in Davis Strait was far colder than normal; an ice pack was coming down it, moving southward. Polly sat for a time trying to envisage it all. And her thoughts turned to Arturo and me, and Nereid. She thought once that Nereid was speaking to her, but then it seemed only fancy. * * * * * The storm was gone by morning. The day warmed again. The wind, unnaturally swinging, blew violently first one way, then another. The sea was lower; another ten feet down--its shore now, where at the seaweed rocky slope it pounded with spent waves from the storm, was another fifty feet away. The mist hung over it, swirled in the wind, and in the lulls gathered like a smoke pall. The smell of the mist was heavy, noisome almost--rotting weed, barnacles, shell-fish, food of the sea, lying on the slimy rocks, rotting, stinking in the sun. The smell of ooze and sea-mud. A heavy dark murk began to hover always down there. The wind blew it away, but it gathered again. Once it came like a wave on the wind, rolling up the slope to this higher level where the Plantet house stood. Polly closed up the building until the outside air cleared.