"Sure, what would we be bothered taking him for?" replied the other, turning the boat's nose and sculling her with a few powerful strokes to the creek's mouth, where the incoming swell lifted her with a buoyant and balloon-like motion that brought a sickening sense of insecurity to the heart of the girl.
"Well, I thought he was coming with us, or I would not have got in."
"Well, you're in now," said Mr. Giveen, "and there's no use crying over spilt milk."
He had taken his hat off, and his bald head shone in the sun. Snow-white gulls were flying in the blue overhead, the profound and glassy swell, which was scarcely noticeable from the shore, out here made vales and hills of water, long green slopes in which the seaweed floated like mermaids' hair.
Far out now the loveliness of the scene around her made the girl forget for a moment her sense of insecurity. The whole beauty and warmth of summer seemed gathered into that September afternoon, and the coast showed itself league upon league, vast cliff and silent strand, snowed with seagulls, terns, guillemots, and fading away twenty miles to the north and twenty miles to the south in the haze and the blueness of the summer sky.
The great silence, the vast distances, the happy blue of sea and sky, the voicelessness of that tremendous coast—all these cast the mind of the gazer into a trance in which the soul responded for a moment to that mystery of mysteries, the call of distance.
"There's the Seven Sisters," said Mr. Giveen, resting his oars and pointing away to the north, where the peaked rocks stood from the sea, cutting the sky with their sharp angles and making froth of the swell with their spurs.
Broad ledges of rock occurred here and there at their base, and on these ledges the seals on an afternoon like this would be sunning themselves, watching with liquid human eyes the surging froth, and ready to dive fathoms deep at the approach of man.
Miss Grimshaw, coming back from her reverie, heard borne on the breeze, which was blowing from the north, the faint crying of the gulls round the rocks. It was the voices of the Seven Sisters for ever lamenting, blue weather or grey, calm or storm.