Andy laid the little half-frozen figure down, carefully, tenderly, beside the wall.
"Too bad!" he said, "too bad! But the sea can be terrible cruel to the sons o' men. I wonder we keep goin' back to her as we do. Now I got to take the poor boy to his mother."
He picked up the body, and trudged off into the storm, toward the fishing-huts.
Wilf went back to his own house, thinking about the sea and how cruel it had been.
"Mother," he said, as they sat together talking over the tragedy, "isn't it queer that you can have such fun with the sea sometimes, swimming in it and rowing on it, and then all of a sudden it gets mad and kills somebody you love? Just suppose I'd gone out in the boat with Jim!"
Wilf thought it fine fun to go swimming, with the strong salt breeze to dry him off like a towel afterwards. In his ears the crying of sea-birds against grey clouds was the sweetest of music. He loved to have the surf knock him about, and the sun burn him red, and he didn't mind if pink jellyfish stung him now and then or a crab got hold of his toes. The roar of the surf sang him to sleep at night like an old nurse.
One day when the spring came, Wilf went out on the salt marshes, his gun over his shoulder, to shoot wild ducks.
He was a regular water-baby.
Round about him all sorts of sea-birds were wheeling and crying. The swift tidal currents found their way up-stream through the marshes.
Wilf, hot and tired, threw the gun on the sand, took off his clothes, and plunged into the clear, cold water.