When she had looked her fill of admiration Terry put it for greater safekeeping in his mouth: at this indignity the shrimp mustered all its activity for a final effort and jumped, tail first, down the young man's throat. Terry commenced to cough and splutter and went purple in the face, and Bella in alarm hit him a violent slap between the shoulders.
Her action had the desired effect, for it dislodged the shrimp from its dangerous resting-place, but a blow from her vigorous young arm was no light matter, and Terry lurched forward onto a tuft of the green seaweed which slid away beneath his feet: to recover his balance he stepped hastily onto a brown stone in the centre of the pool, but it proved yet more treacherous than the green: his heels flew from beneath him, leaving long nail marks on the greasy surface of the stone, and he fell flat on his back in the shallow water.
He lay still for a moment, stunned by the surprise, then rose to his feet, his clothes dripping streams of water and his hair matted with the long green seaweed, and found Bella shaking with a great spasm of laughter. Her large serious gray eyes were completely closed, and her pretty face contorted with the vulgarity of excessive merriment. He grinned sheepishly and said,—
'Them stones is powerful slippy.'
But she only laughed the more, till she became so weak that she collapsed onto the nearest rock, the tears streaming down her cheeks. At the sight a vague resentment gradually crept over Terry's docile Irish nature: he felt dimly that no woman would laugh like that at a man whom she really loved, and the change worked in the appearance of her features annoyed him. He exclaimed sharply,—
'Ah, quit now. Much you care av I'd been choked.'
Bella looked up, surprised at the unusual tone, but stopped laughing at once and replied meekly:
'Niver heed me, Terry, dear, I didn't offer to vex yous.'
Peace was at once restored, and they began to scramble together hand in hand over the uneven rocks towards the sea. All that was now left of it in the bay was a single streak of silver, which lay pent and sleeping in its narrow channel, that had been worn deep in the solid rock by the current of ages. Its bottom was piled with serpentine coils of wrack, sea-ferns in all their varied beauty of form and color, and 'slock-morrows' with their thick hairy stems and long slimy leaves: some of them still gripped with their roots the stones which they had torn with them beneath the stress of storm from their ocean bed. Beneath the misty film of the breeze upon the surface the whole mass writhed with each recurring pulse of the unresting sea like a living welter of sea-snakes.
'That's the wrack-hole,' announced Terry the well informed.