“I’ve got no use for spirits,” he told her.  “The splendid thing about us is that we’re flesh and blood and spirit too.  That’s the really magnificent combination for happy creatures.  A spirit at best can only be an unfinished thing.  People make such a fuss about escaping from the flesh.  What the deuce do you want to escape from your flesh for, if it’s healthy and tough and fine?”

“When they get old, they feel like that.”

“Let the old comfort the old then,” he said.  “I’m proud of my flesh and bones, and so are you, and so we ought to be; and if I had to give them up and die, I should hate it.  And if I found myself in another world, a poor shivering idea and nothing else, without flesh and bones to cover me, or clothes to cover them, I should feel ashamed of myself.  And they might call it Paradise as much as they liked, but it would be Hades to me.  Of course many of the ghosts would pretend that they liked it; but I bet none would really—­so jolly undignified to be nothing but an idea.”

She laughed.

“That’s just what I feel too; and of course it’s utterly wrong of us,” she said.  “It shows we have got a lot to learn.  We only feel like this because we’re young.  Perhaps young ghosts begin like that; but I expect they soon get past it.”

“I should never want to get past it,” he said.

He rolled over on the grass and played with her hand.

“How could you love and cuddle a ghost?”

“No doubt you could love it.  I don’t suppose you could cuddle it.  You wouldn’t want to.”

“No—­that’s true, Sabina.  If this cliff carried away this moment, and we were both smashed to pulp and arrived together in another world without any clothes and both horribly down on our luck—­but it’s too ghastly a picture.  I should howl all through eternity—­to think what I’d missed.”

They talked nonsense, played with their thoughts and came nearer and nearer together.  One tremendous and masterful impulse drew them on—­a raging hunger and thirst on his part and something not widely different on hers.  Again and again they caught themselves in each other’s arms, then broke off, grew serious and strove to steady the trend of their desires.

Golden Cap was a lonely spot and few visited it that day.  Once a middle-aged man and woman surprised them where they sat behind a rock near the edge of the great precipices.  The man had grown warm and mopped his face and let the wind cool it.

He was ugly, clumsily built, and displayed large calves in knickerbockers and a hot, bald head.

“How hideous human beings can be,” said Raymond after they had gone.

“He wasn’t hideous in his wife’s eyes, I expect.”

“Middle-age is mercifully blind no doubt to its own horrors,” he said.  “You can respect and even admire old age, like other ruins, if it’s picturesque, but middle-age is deadly always.”

He smoked and they dawdled the hours away until Sabina declared it was tea time.  Then they sought a little inn at Chidcock and spent an hour there.