"You come to fis-s?" she asked.
He said that he had thought of it.
"There is wa-ter in the boat, but indeed I not touch it. I go and empty it," she said.
But he stopped her.—"Oh, it's no good now—too bright," he said. "Might try in the evening. Sit down, won't you? I want to ask you some questions."
She curled herself up in the bracken, and he set his back against the wall of the hut and began to fill his pipe.
But instead of questioning her, John Willie had all the appearances of a man who was questioning himself. He sat a little behind Ynys, so that when she looked straight before her he lost her full profile; and he moved no more than she. He was suddenly thinking how thoroughly sick he was of Llanyglo.
For if he had helped to make Llanyglo, and knew its lighting and its watering, its building and its leases and its subsoil, Llanyglo had also helped to make him. The drub-drub on the Pier, the inanities of his friend Percy Briggs, evening parties that began at midnight and ended with the sun high in the sky, complaints from his sister that she saw him only in the short intervals between a coming home and a setting out again—this had been pretty much the reaction of Llanyglo on John Willie Garden. He was a very ordinary young man.—But here was a world peopled only by sheep, the myriad insects that hopped and wove and chirruped in the tall fern, the kites and curlews overhead, and the trout far below the surface of the lake. His lashes made rainbows before his half-closed eyes, and those eyes, opening again, could gaze at the tips of the sunny fern against the deeps of the sky until the difference between them became almost as intensified as the difference between dark and bright. Spiders no bigger than freckles seemed to be doing important things under their bright green roofs—for only the under sides of the fronds were green and translucent: the fern on which the sun beat directly was no more green than Ynys's hair was black.... And the sunny parts of Ynys's arms were of the colour of a hayfield with much sorrel, while the round beneath was as cool as the under curve of a boat on the water....
It would have been part of the peace of that hot midday could he have dozed with his head in the crook of that arm.
Of other desire to break its peace had he none.
And Ynys?