"You will have to give your brain a rest to-night, then, Mr Wilkie, and husband your fibre, as there is nothing here to renew it with--no larder, even, except the sea down there. I am glad that, being a woman, I have no brain to speak of. The exhaustion of its fibre won't be noticed."
"You've hit it, Margaret!" cried Blount--"without even caring--as you so often do. Smart girl, and don't know it. The sea is our larder, full of fish, and Jake has lines in the boat's locker. Let's go fishing."
"The boat will be wet after the rain," said Rose, "and I have had one wetting already. I shall not go fishing, thanks; but I do not mind looking among the rocks for limpets and mussels, and things. They tell me they are good to eat, when people are very hungry."
"Not a bad thing to do. Whoever likes, can fish from the boat; I shall shell-fish on shore," chimed in Margaret.
"To shell-fish is not wisely selfish," retorted Wilkie, with the air of a wag. "How much more comfortable to sit in the boat hauling up your fish, than go pottering and stumbling over slippery rocks with a lapful of rubbish you won't be able to cook after you have got it! while we could broil some fish nicely on the hot coals. Believe me, it's better to be wisely selfish than to bother about worthless shell-fish."
"I don't think I am selfish; but you may end in becoming a punster if you are not warned in time; and to show you are not selfish, you had better go out with Jake, and we will all assist you to cook and eat whatever you may be lucky enough to catch."
Wilkie looked to the other two men, but both were reaching down hats for the girls from lofty pegs where they had been hung. No one heeded him, and he deemed it best to follow Jake, who had already gone down to the boat and was preparing to launch it. If he was condemned to be a supernumerary, it was better to be a useful and independent one afloat, than merely in the way on shore; and he had his reward in a calm and tranquil evening on the water, his self-love unfretted by the view of less learned men preferred to himself, his hand bobbing peacefully with his line, and his head in a cloud of soothing tobacco. Occasionally he would get a bite, and hauled in his fish with the consoling thought that there were some creatures whom he could catch, and that the girls would not object to partake of his fish, however they might disregard himself.
The four remaining in the hut stood by the door and watched the launching of the boat; then they likewise descended to the beach and began to look among the rocks for shell-fish. But either there were few to find, or the seekers were inattentive in their search, for they did not find many, and soon wearying, abandoned even the pretence of being useful.
They wandered idly along in the purple light, now waning swiftly into bluish grey and shadowy indistinctness. Of the wild and lonely scene of half an hour ago, nothing was left but the dusky darkness of the land lifting its solid outline against the tinted sky, where wan transparent gleams of the departing day contended with the darkling blue of night, and the dim sea escaping from the shadows of the islands spread away to the horizon, to bound the low-down glimmer in the southern sky.
The talk had split itself into two separate strands, and the talkers had drifted apart, each couple following the thread of its own discourse, and oblivious to its divergence from the other. Joseph and Rose were alone again. She was walking by his side, looking with level gaze straight out before, to the distant line where sea and sky, straining to meet each other, were yet parted where they touched, as two who could not be united. She was thinking--or more, perhaps, she was waiting--with head inclining forward and to her companion, while his eyes sought the ground. His footsteps sounded irregular as he walked, as though he were not at ease, but laboured with something to be said, for which the word was difficult to find. He looked up more than once as if about to speak, and then his eyes fell again without his having spoken. She did not observe. Her eyes were on the horizon and the light was dim.