"But suppose you wanted anything during the night?" "What should I want?" "Of course, I forgot. You don't have headaches. I have--frightful ones." "Then why don't you come out too? There's quite a jolly place here. I'd help you to carry your things." "Oh, I've got to read," Richenda had shaken her head. "You'd be heaps better for it----" Louie had not much in common with Richenda--save perhaps (she loved little cuts like this at herself) that both of their fathers were literary. But she had had that rather brutal snub on her conscience. That had come out next. "You do study too hard," she had said, "and--I say, Earle--I'm sorry for what I said that night--you know--when I snapped at you and said you'd your medal to get. Will you forget that?" The next moment she had almost wished she hadn't said it, Earle's hungry gratitude had shown so. "It wasn't your fault a bit," the red-haired girl had broken out impulsively. "It was all mine. I ought to have minded my own business. But I was so--so----" "Well, try sleeping up here," Louie had cut her short. "It's jolly." But Richenda had gone on. "I was stupid," she had murmured. "I don't know that you were. You see how it is." "Oh, I was, I was----" "Well, as I tell you, I don't think much of my mother's lot." "Ah, _you_ can say so," Richenda had replied, shaking her head. Then, as Louie had thrown down her mattress, "You don't mean to say you undress here?" she had asked. "Well, I don't sleep in my clothes." "But don't your things get wet?" "I wrap 'em in my waterproof.... You won't come up, then, and run down to the shore for a bathe before breakfast?" "Causton, they'll be dropping on you yet!" Earle had said, almost frightened. "Well, without the bathe?" "Oh, I should die!" And Richenda had gone back to sleep where she might find remedies for her headaches within reach of her hand during the night. Louie sat on the stile. The sea had a soft bloom, and the sky was of the colour of the whites of a baby's eyes. Bees hummed among the scabious, and blue and sulphur butterflies hovered over the patches of wild thyme. A tramp, sullying the air behind her, crept slowly up to Bristol; a single nodding grass-head near at hand shut her out almost completely. Mazzicombe, down under the hill, was hidden. Louie watched it all, thinking of nothing, or, if of anything, of how sweet it was to relax all her muscles to the point of not stumbling off the stile, and all her mind save that she might still be just conscious that she existed and was Louie Causton.... "Hallo," said a slow, imperturbable voice behind her; "here we are again." She started a little. Roy Lovenant-Smith was returning with a baulk of old wood over his shoulder. "Oh, it's you," she said. She did not know whether she was glad or annoyed to be interrupted. "Yes, it's me," he replied placidly. She was silent for a moment; then: "I thought you hadn't to hang about here?" she said.