Barry’s hand gripped Nan’s.  He was here then, and it had come.  Her head swam; she felt light, like thistledown on the wind.

They came up from the station into quiet, gay, warm Penzance, and had tea at a shop.  They were going to stay at Marazion that night and the next, and spend the day bicycling to Land’s End and back.  They were all four full of vigour, brimming with life and energy that needed to be spent.  But Gerda looked pale.

“She’s been overworking in a stuffy office,” Barry said.  “And not, except when she dined with me, getting proper meals.  What do you think she weighs, Nan?”

“About as much as that infant there,” Nan said, indicating a stout person of five at the next table.

“Just about, I daresay.  She’s only six stone.  What are we to do about it?”

His eyes caressed Gerda, as they might have caressed a child.  He would be a delightful uncle by marriage, Nan thought.

They took the road to Marazion.  The tide was going out.  In front of them the Mount rose in a shallowing violet sea.

“My word!” said Barry, and Kay, screwing up his eyes, murmured, “Good old Mount.”  Gerda’s lips parted in a deep breath; beauty always struck her dumb.

Into the pale-washed, straggling old village they rode, stabled their bicycles, and went down to the shining evening sands, where now the paved causeway to the Mount was all exposed, running slimy and seaweedy between rippled wet sands and dark, slippery rocks.  Bare-footed they trod it, Gerda and Kay in front, Barry and Nan behind, and the gulls talking and wheeling round them.

Nan stopped, the west in her eyes.  “Look.”

Point beyond point they saw stretching westward to Land’s End, dim and dark beyond a rose-flushed sea.

“Isn’t it clear,” said Nan.  “You can see the cliff villages ever so far along ...  Newlyn, Mousehole, Clement’s Island off it—­and the point of Lamorna.”

Barry said “We’ll go to Land’s End by the coast road to-morrow, shan’t we, not the high road?”

“Oh, the coast road, yes.  It’s about twice the distance, with the ups and downs, and you can’t ride all the way.  But we’ll go by it.”

For a moment they stood side by side, looking westward over the bay.

Nan said, “Aren’t you glad you came?”

“I should say so!”

His answer came, quick and emphatic.  There was a pause after it.  Nan suddenly turned on him the edge of a smile.

Barry did not see it.  He was not looking at her, nor over the bay, but in front of him, to where Gerda, a thin little upright form, moved bare-legged along the shining causeway to the moat.

Nan’s smile flickered out.  The sunset tides of rose flamed swiftly over her cheeks, her neck, her body, and receded as sharply, as if someone had hit her in the face.  Her pause, her smile, had been equivalent, as she saw them, to a permission, even to an invitation.  He had turned away unnoticing, a queer, absent tenderness in his eyes, as they followed Gerda ...  Gerda ... walking light-footed up the wet causeway....  Well, if he had got out of the habit of wanting to make love to her, she would not offer him chances again.  When he got the habit back, he must make his own chances as best he could.