“I do not believe he needed adventure so much,” disputed Ellen, moved half by interest in the point she was discussing and half by the desire to assert that she had as much right as anybody to talk about Richard, and maybe knew as much about him as anybody.  “It’s not possible that Richard could ever have been at his ease in a life of action.  He’d be miserable if he wasn’t always the leader, and he couldn’t always be the leader when he was sixteen.  And then he’d not be happy when he was the leader because he thinks so poorly of most people that he doesn’t feel there’s any point in leading them anywhere, so there couldn’t have been any pleasure in it even when he was older.  Isn’t that so?”

“I suppose so,” muttered Marion uncommunicatively.

“Then why did he go to sea?” persisted Ellen.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” murmured the other, but her face, as she paused at a gate in the orchard hedge, was amused and meditative.  She knew quite well.

It was one of those days of east wind that are clear and bright and yet at enmity with the appearances they so definitely disclose.  The sea, which had now covered all the mud and had run into the harbour and was lifting the ships on to an even keel, was the colour of a sharpened pencil-point.  The green of the grass was acid.  Under the grey glare of the sky the soft purples of the bare trees and hedges became a rough darkness without quality.  Yet as they walked down the field-path to the floor of the marshes Ellen was well content.  This, like the Pentlands, was far more than a place.  It was a mental state, a revisitable peace, a country on whose soil the people and passions of imagination lived more intensely than on other earth.  There was a wind blowing that was as salt as sea-winds are, yet travelled more mildly over the estuary land than it would have over the waves, like some old captain who from old age had come to live ashore and keeps the roll and bluster of his calling though he does no more than tell children tales of storms.

And through this clear, unstagnant yet unturbulent air there rose the wild yet gentle cry of a multitude of birds.  It was not the coarse brave cry of the gull that can breast tempests and dive deep for unfastidious food.  It was not the austere cry of the curlew who dwells on moors when they are unvisitable by men.  This was the voice of some bird appropriate to the place.  It was unhurried.  Whatever lived on the plain saw when the sun rose on its edge shadows as long as living things ever see them, and watched them shrink till noon, and lengthen out again till sundown; and time must have seemed the slower for being so visible.  It had the sound of water in it.  Whatever lived here spent half its life expecting the running of waveless but briny tides up the creeks, through mud-paved culverts into the dykes that fed the wet marshes with fresh wetness; and the other half deploring their slow, sluggish sucking back to the sea.  Sorrow or any other intemperance of feeling seemed a discourteous disturbance of an atmosphere filled with this resigned harmony.