“How do you mean ’scent’?”
“He’d smell trouble; he’s awful sharp.”
“Sort of telepathy.”
“Which?”
“Mind reading.”
“I dunno, but I reckon he’s not worrying, and if he was he’d be alongside here pronto.”
Her face was like a buttercup in the extraordinary light of that sunset. The whole sky was buttercup color; the great sea was seething round the great sun, now half-gone, churning and washing round him, a blazing globe sinking in boiling gold.
Golden gulls, golden sky, golden sea,—all fading at last, the purple of night breaking through, rushing dark from the west across the sea.
The shipwrecked mariners lost their golden faces and hands, and, as they sat down with their backs to the dinghy and the remains of the “grub” between them, laughing gulls, passing like ghosts in the twilight, hailed them, while the stars broke out to look above the darkness and the tepid wind.
There is nothing like eating to keep up the spirits. Jude got less doleful. In the stir of mind caused by the new circumstances she had clean forgotten the “hants,” nor did she remember them for a moment now, as she chatted away in an uplift of spirits caused by the food and the recognition that to be downcast was futile.