Still another change: the rifts away to the north and the south had all turned to sea green, and right in the east, when we look round, we find that the higher clouds that erst were grey and dull, are now a burning bronze and crimson.
Then the clouds kept borrowing each other’s colours at second hand. But at last crimson and yellow changed to lurid bronze and purple, then to grey and to darker grey, and soon, out from the only green rift left, shone a pale star.
It is night.
The air is chill and cold. Birds—strange, wild, low-flying creatures whose names we know not—hurry past us, or over us, to their eeries in some distant rock, and the silence is unbroken save by the clunk-clank—clunk-clank—of the oars in the rowlocks.
Jill is leaning against me, and I feel him shiver slightly.
“Jill,” I say, “you’re not well, old man.”
“Oh yes, brother, I’m well enough.”
“But you’re not downright, jolly well.”
“I feel a trifle shivery, that’s all, brother. I had an ugly dream; and besides, I don’t think I’ve quite recovered my sea-bath yet.”
“Look ’ee here, sir,” said Ritchie. “That young man isn’t quite the thing. Now I’m going to prescribe. He’s going to bed down among the dogs, and what’s more, he’s going to sleep. He’ll have a tot o’ rum as medicine. There are times, gentlemen, when such a thing may do good. Now’s one o’ them. And if he doesn’t wake up early in the morning his old self, then my name isn’t Ted Ritchie.”