"We'd have to use the sail and tack a bit, and we'd have the oars."
"What about food?" asked Prudence.
"We'd sling it in a can on the mast. Water's the trouble; we'd have to distil sea-water, and that takes coal and might be a bit difficult; there isn't a place for coal on board yet."
Mollie remembered the attar of roses and decided not to embark upon that voyage. "We would be pretty thirsty before there was enough water distilled for us all to drink," she thought to herself.
"Well, we'll have to be getting home now," said Prudence, with a sigh.
"It will be dark before so very long."
A somewhat silent and subdued party set out on the homeward scramble, the boys in front, Mollie and Prue together, and Grizzel in the rear, being hampered by her bootfuls of periwinkles, which would keep falling out. She stopped at last, and, sitting down, she laced her boots tightly up and tied the tops round with the lace ends. When she looked up from this task she stopped again to admire the gorgeous sunset. The whole sky was ablaze, and the sea had changed from blue to crimson and gold; the wet beach was gleaming like an opal, pale-rose and lavender, with fiery amber lights shimmering on the rippled sand. The brilliant glow of the western sky was reflected in the east, and the cliffs stood out sharply against the light, themselves flushed with pink. Grizzel's keen young gaze ran along the outline, black where it cut the sky.
"There's nothing there," she said to herself, "only that flagstaff hut, and it's as square as square."
As she watched, a door opened in the side of the hut and a man came out, swinging a billy-can in his hand. Suddenly Grizzel caught her breath. Where had she heard someone say that that hut was a tiny refreshment-bar, where a man could go in and get boiling water for his tea—that everlasting tea which the Australian drinks at any and every hour of the day? It was Papa, and he had said they called the hut 'The Nose'—short, Grizzel felt sure, for The Duke's Nose. Her eyes ran quickly down the cliff underneath—yes, she could see the cave quite plainly when she looked hard, though to the casual glance it looked like a deep crevice in the cliff.
She looked after the others. They had scrambled on ahead while she was tying up her periwinkles, and were now too far away to hear anything but a shout. She put her two hands up to her mouth and gave the long shrill "Cooo-eeeee!" of the Australian-born child, which caused five heads to be turned in her direction instantaneously. Prudence started running back, fearing that her sister had fallen and hurt herself. Grizzel's gesticulations made things no plainer to the others—when she pointed to the hut they thought she meant them to get help, so that Hugh and Dick set off towards the cliff, while Jerry came on with Mollie and Prudence in case there should be a broken limb.
Even when they got within hailing distance they did not understand, for what between keeping a foothold on the slippery rocks, hanging on to her periwinkles, and her excitement over her discovery, Grizzel was getting breathless and incoherent, and all she did was to point a small forefinger at the hut and say: "Duke's-nose-you-know-duke's-nose-you-know-your-nose-dukes-know."