Then he closed his eyes. A moment before and he had been leagues away from sleep, but with the compulsory closing of his eyes a drowsiness began to steal on him. The wind had died to nothing and in the dead silence of the night the sound of the waves on the mile and a half of spit came loud and low, rhythmical, mesmeric. It was as though the tide of sleep were rising to drift him off.
Now, suddenly, he was walking in the blazing sunlight on the spit, and toward him was walking the “wuzzard,”—a little old man in a cocked hat with a spyglass under his arm, who vanished, giving place to Jude, carrying a hatful of gulls’ eggs.
Then Skelton landed from somewhere, and Jude, turning, was calling him a “pesky brute.”
The words broke the dream, and he opened his eyes. The moon had just risen, touching the spit, and in her light, seated on the sand propped up on its stilts, a spirit crab, white as snow with ruby eyes, was staring at Jude.
Drugged with weariness and ozone, he closed his eyes for one moment, determined to rise up and drive the thing away in one moment. When he opened his eyes again the sun was rising.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE RETURN
The gulls were mewing and calling and flying above him in the blue. He was lying on his back, his left arm out, and Jude’s head on his shoulder.
She had snuggled up beside him for company, and then, regardless of spirit crabs, “hants,” and the possibility of crustaceans landing in shiploads to devour them, had fallen asleep. Her arm was flung over his chest. It was the embrace of a tired child, delightful to wake up to as the freshness of the air and the new life of the world and the innocence of the flower-blue sky, delightful as her breath, sweet and warm against his cheek. As he moved she stirred, grumbled something under her breath, shifted her head so that his arm was released, and turned on her other side, with her right arm flung out on the sand.