'Let me see,' said Bella, clinging timidly to his arm as she crept nearer and peered into its depths, with a shrinking awe as though at some half-human monster that battened upon mankind. For its name was known through the countryside as the bane of widows and childless mothers: at half-tide the waves poured over the surrounding rocks and swept seaward through this passage in a race that the strongest swimmer could not stem, and which had hurried many a venturesome beginner to his doom.
But many a time in the after days Terry looked back upon that moment, when the girl beside him clung to his hand and confided in his protection, as the happiest in his life. Such trifles serve to uplift or cast down a lover.
Bella shuddered and drew back, and they passed onwards towards the Cormorants' Rock. The boulders ceased and they came out upon the flat bed-rock. Women were there gathering sloak and dillusk, the spinach and edible moss of the sea: the constant passage of generations of naked feet had worn a track smooth and free from barnacles over the flaky slate: a row of footholds carved by the same agency led round the projecting corner, which was whitened down to high-water mark by the droppings of the cormorants from their nightly roosting-places above. As they looked, a couple of the women attempted the passage. The day was calm, but the Atlantic is never still, and rising out of nothing 'the shining sensitive silver of the sea' broke with a dull murmur upon this outpost of the cliff. The women waited until a wave larger than usual had passed, and began their journey, but the treacherous sea regathered itself and was upon them in the midst, dashing up beneath their petticoats. They flattened their bodies desperately against the rock, and twined their fingers in the short button-wrack that grew at high-water mark: their skirts floated wide upon the surface of the swell, but its force did not avail to pluck them from their hold. It retreated baffled, and the two bedraggled figures scrambled round the corner and were lost to view.
'Holy Mother, but it's a mercy they weren't lost,' cried Bella.
'Ay,' replied Terry, 'the tide must have turned. It's top spring the day, so it must be afther twelve. Troth, it's near hand wan,' he continued, cocking his eye at the sun. It wasn't often that he had the opportunity to unload such a store of information, and he made the best of the occasion.
Bella regarded him with wide eyes as he displayed this unsuspected hoard of marine lore, and treated him with unwonted respect for the remainder of the day.
'It's time we was goin' home, or I'll be late for the milkin',' she said, and they began to retrace their steps.
When they got off the boulders once more onto the sandy floor of the little bay, the tide was coming in with long pauses and feigned retreats followed by sudden rushes. In the midst of its path stood an isolated altar of four large stones just islanded by a tongue of bubbling wavelets.
'I mind when I was a wee fellah,' said Terry, 'we used to see which of us could stay on them foor stones longest without gettin' wet.'
'Let's try,' cried Bella, gleefully.