Killigrew was not long in discovering this place, which he declared presented an unrivalled stage for the setting of vast dream-dramas he watched trailing their cloudy way across it, and Ishmael was not loth to share his plateau with him.  The incursion of Vassie was another matter, but by this time—­nearly a month after that momentous birthday—­Ishmael felt helplessly drifting.  He was enjoying himself, while Killigrew showed no signs of wishing to return to Paris and Vassie was blooming as never before.  She sat to him for sketches that never were finished, and that to her eyes, though she did not say so, looked just the same even when Killigrew declared a stroke more would wreck their perfection.  Ishmael was neglecting his personal supervision of the farm these days—­he had developed a new theory that it was time he tested how far things could go well without him.  He had heard a hint or two dropped to the effect that the friend from foreign parts was only amusing himself with proud Vassie, but he paid no heed.  What could be more absurd, he reflected, than the idea that she could want a boy a couple of years her junior and a mere student to fall in love with her?  Thus Ishmael, while Killigrew laughed at him and with Vassie all day long, and she glowed and answered him and seemed as light-hearted, as either of them.

On a sunlit day, one of those March days which, in Cornwall, can hold a sudden warmth borrowed from the months to come, they all three sat upon the grass of the plateau, accompanied by Boase, who had taken them on an expedition to an ancient British village, where, with many little screams, Vassie’s wide skirts had had to be squeezed and pulled through the dark underground “rooms” of a dead people.  Now, as the day drew to a burnished close, they all sat upon the soft turf, and Killigrew and Ishmael watched with half-closed eyes the play of the sea-birds below them.  The wheatears flirted their black and white persons over the rocks, the gulls dipped and wheeled, planed past them on level wings, uttering their harsh cries, or for a flashing moment rested so close that the blot of blood-red above their curved yellow beaks showed vividly; out to sea a gannet hung a sheer two hundred feet in air, then dropped, beak downwards....  He hit the sea like a stone with his plumage-padded breast, a column of water shot up from his meteoric fall, and he reappeared almost before it subsided with his prey already down his shaken throat.  Killigrew clapped his hands in approbation and Vassie feigned interest.

“What a life!” exclaimed Killigrew; “if we do have to live again in the form of animals, I hope I shall be a bird, a sea-bird for choice.  Just imagine being a gull or a gannet....  I wish one could paint the pattern they make in the air as they fly—­a vast invisible web of curves, all of them pure beauty.”

“Don’t wish to be a bird in this part of the world, then,” advised the Parson drily.

“Why not?  Don’t they have a good time?”