“Lord, what a mind you’ve got!” he said.

“Can’t you see that’s how people are—­most of them.  Oh, poor things!  If I’d stopped to think I’d have been sorry for Ole Fred instead of putting him in the sea for the sharks.”

He looked at her amusedly again, and then at the kettle boiling on the little spirit-stove.

“I say, old lady, theories are all very nice—­after tea,” he suggested.

“Oh, is it tea time?” she said, with a little sigh.  Then, brightening, she hummed a little tune all wrong as she cut bread and butter, laid a little spray of bush roses round his plate and went down to the kitchen to ask Mrs. King’s advice about what treatment she could give to eggs to make them nicer than usual for him.

At the door she turned back.

“You know, Louis—­they’ve such lovely, shining wings—­all beautiful colours—­”

“What?” he said.  He had already dismissed the “silly little girl’s” arguments from his mind.

“I’m thinking about people and bluebottles!  Lovely iridescent wings all sploshed down in sticky stuff.  And swift legs—­it seems such a pity to cripple them so that they can’t fly or run.”

“I do so want my tea,” he said, pretending to groan.

She ran down the stairs with a laugh.

That day she discovered the possibilities of the roof.

At the end of the landing on which their big top room opened was a short iron ladder.  She decided to explore and, climbing up the iron ladder, pushed up the trapdoor.  A cry of delight escaped her as she thrust her head through the opening.  It was a great, flat roof, separated from the next ones by low copings of stone work, flat topped and about two feet high.  The town, as she climbed out and stood on the roof, lay beneath her like a plan.  People looked like flies in the streets, the tramcars like accelerated caterpillars.  The water of the harbour was still and smooth and as incredibly blue as the water she had seen Mrs. King using in her laundry work that morning.  Wharves or trees ran right down into the blueness.  The big ships lying at anchor made her heart beat fast with their clean beauty and romance; the bare, clean roofs running along for perhaps fifty houses gave her a breath of freedom that brought back Lashnagar and Ben Grief.  She thought, with a pang of pity, about Louis, the product of suburban London, chained to streets and houses almost all his boyhood, knowing nothing of the scourge of the winds, the courage of wide, high places.  She tumbled down the ladder, her eyes bright.

“Louis—­Oh Louis, come up on the roof!  It’s perfectly beautiful!  I’ve been so worried about you shut up here like this, and I’ve felt so choked myself with this one room.  But up there I’ll make you shut your eyes, and I’ll tell you all about Ben Grief, and you’ll think you’re there.  I’ll make you hear the curlews and the gulls and see Jock and Tammas come in with the boats.”