He smiled upon it now, told her of his childish adventures and took her in to see an ancient chamber where he and Daniel had often played their games.

“Our nurse used to call it a ‘cubby hole,’” he said.  “And she was always; jolly thankful when she could pilot us in here from the dangers of the cliffs and the old pier, or the boats in the harbour.  The place is just the same—­only shrunk.  The plaster from the walls is all mouldering away, or you might see the pictures we used to draw upon them with paint from the fishermen’s paint pots.  Down below they bring the sand and grade it for the builders.  They’ve carted away millions of tons of sand from the foreshore in the last fifty years and will cart away millions more, no doubt, for the sea always renews it.”

She wandered with him and listened half-dreaming.  The air for them was electric with their love and they yearned for each other.

“I wish we could spend the whole blessed day in this little den together,” he said suddenly putting his arms round her; and that brought her to some sense of reality, but none of danger.  Not a tremor of peril in his company had she ever felt, for did not perfect love cast out fear, and why should a woman hesitate to trust herself with one, to her, the most precious in the world?

He suggested dawdling awhile; but she would not.

“We are to eat our breakfast at Eype Beach,” she reminded him, “and that’s a mile or two yet.”

So they went on their way again, breasted the grassy cliffs westward of the haven, admired the fog bank touched with gold that hung over the river flats, praised Bridport wakening under its leafy woods, marked the herons on the river mud in the valley and the sparrow-hawk poised aloft above the downs.  She took his arm up the hill and, like birds themselves, they went lightly together, strong, lissome, radiant in health and youth and the joy of a shared worship that made all things sweet.

They talked of the great day when the world was to know their secret.  The secret itself proved so attractive to both that they agreed to keep it a little longer.  Their shared knowledge proved amusing and each told the other of the warnings and advice and fears imparted by careful friends of both sexes, who knew not the splendid truth.

How small the wisdom of the wise appeared—­how peddling and foolish and mean—­contrasted with their superb trust.  How sordid were the ways of the world, its fears and suspicions, from the vantage point to which they had climbed.  Material things even suggested this thought to Raymond, and when before noon, they stood on the green crown of Golden Cap, with the earth and sea spread out around them in mighty harmonies of blue and green, he told Sabina so.

“We ought to be perched on a place like this,” he said, “because we are to the rest of the world, in mind and in happiness, as we are here in body too.”

“Only the sea gulls can go higher, and I always feel they’re more like spirits than birds,” she answered.