They gravely picked them out, and it took some minutes to do it. Then in turn each crossed to the merchant in his corner and paid the purchase price, then came back to the light in the doorway.
Denny held out a delicate, translucent, rosy shell. "It won't hold my gratitude," he said. "You'll never know.... I used to see you in the moonlight, between me and the bars.... Somebody had cried for me, ... wept passionately. It helped to keep me human. I've always seen you with a light about you. This is your shell."
"Thank you. I shall keep your kind gift always," said Hagar. She spoke in a child's lyric voice, quaintly and properly, so precisely as she might have spoken at twelve years old that, startled herself, she laughed, and Denny, with a catch in his voice, laughed too. "Oh," she cried with something like a sob, "sixteen years to slip from one like that!" She held out a small purple shell. "This is yours, Denny Gayde.... And I've thought of you often, and wished you well. If I did you, unknowing, a service, so you, unknowing, have done me a service, too. That summer morning, long ago—it shocked me awake. The world since then has been different always, more pitiful and nearer. Here's your shell. It won't hold my gratitude and well-wishing either."
They passed out between the coral and the sea-fans, entered the surrey, and it drove on. Now they were back by the sea. The tide was far out, the expanse of shallows vaster. The salt pools had been fired by the torch of the sky; they lay in reds and purples, wonderful. The smell of the sea impregnated the air and there blew a whispering wind. The town began to appear, straggling out to meet them, low chimneyless houses of the poorer sort. Men and women were out in the twilight, and children calling to one another and playing. The vivid lights had faded from sky and from wet sand and rock, shoal and lagoon, but colour was left, though it was the ghost of itself. It swam in the air, it gleamed from the earth. Warmth was there, too, and languor, and the melancholy of the gathering night. A dreamlike quality came into things—the children's voices sounded faint and far; only there were waves of some faint odour, coming now it seemed from gardens.... Now they were in the town and the sea was shut away.
"One half of my fairy month is gone."
"You are sleeping better?"
"Yes—much better.... Where shall we go to-morrow?"
"Leave it to to-morrow. Look at the star ... oh, beauty!"
When to-morrow was here they walked inland to Fort Fincastle, and then to the Queen's Staircase. Negro children raced after them with some sweet-smelling yellow flower in their hands. "Penny, Boss!—Penny, Boss!—Penny, Boss!" When they were gone, and when two surreys filled with white-dressed hotel people vanished likewise, they had the Queen's Staircase to themselves. Broad-stepped, cut in the living rock, it plunged downward to the green bottom of the seventy-foot deep ancient quarry. Trees overhung it and yellow flowers, and there was a rich, green light like the bottom of the sea. Denny and Hagar sat upon a step a quarter of the way down.
"I do not know why," said Denny, "there should be so deadly a fear of upheaval. All growth comes with upheaval—surely all spiritual growth comes so. Growth by accretion means little. Growth from within comes with upheaval—what you have been transformed or discarded. A little higher, a little finer breaks the sod and grows forth so. The deadly fear should be of down-sinking—from the stagnant grow-no-farther-than-our-fathers-grew down—down.... Of course, the Woman Movement means upheaval and great upheaval—but that is a poor reason for condemnation.... As far as its political aspect is concerned, most open-minded men, Socialists and others, with whom I come into contact, admit the right and the need. Unless a man is very stupid he can see what a farce it is to talk of a democracy—government of the people, for the people, by the people—when one out of every two human beings is notoriously living under an aristocracy. And, of course, we who want an associative gain of livelihood, no less than an associative form of government, stand for her equality there.... But to me there is something other than all that in this upheaval. I cannot express it. I do not know what it is, unless it is some faint, supernal promise.... It is as though the Spirit were again working upon the face of the waters." He paused, gazing upward at the sky above the wall of rock. "We are in for a deep change."