We were silent. It is not easy for three, so closely knit, so intimate, as we had been for so many years, suddenly to enter upon a new comradeship, wherein three that had been as one were now several. A new reticence had come to each of us. We walked in silence—conscious of the beauty of the day, in sea and sky and already purpling moors; of the white gulls flecking the azure, and the yellowhammers and stonechats flitting among the gorse and fragrant bog-myrtle—we knew that none was inclined to speak. Each had his own thoughts.
The three dreamers—for so we were in that lovely hour of dream—walked steadfastly onward. It was not more than an hour after noon that we came to an inlet of the sea, so narrow that it looked like a stream, only that a salt air arose between the irises which thickly bordered it, and that the sunken rock-ledges were fragrant with sea-pink and the stone-convolvulus. The moving tidal water was grass-green, save where dusked with long, mauve shadows.
"Let us rest here," said the Body. "It is so sweet in the sunlight, here by this cool water."
The Will smiled as he threw himself down upon a mossy slope that reached from an oak's base to the pebbly margins.
"It is ever so with you," he said, still smiling. "You love rest, as the wandering clouds love the waving hand of the sun."
"What made you think of that?" asked the Soul abruptly, who till that moment had been rapt in silent commune with his inmost thoughts.
"Why do you ask?"
"Because I, too, was thinking that just as the waving hand of the sun beckons the white wandering clouds, as a shepherd calls to his scattered sheep, so there is a hand waving to us to press forward. Far away, yonder, a rainbow is being woven of sun and mist. Perhaps, there, we may come upon that which we have come out to see."
"But the Body wishes to rest. And, truly, it is sweet here in the sunflood, and by this moving green water, which whispers in the reeds and flags, and sings its own sea-song the while."
"Let us rest, then."