“We’re not well enough for anything,” Barry returned.  “But we’d better do it.  We don’t want to die here, with the sea washing over us in this damp way.”

They climbed weakly up to the top of the rock promontory, and along it till they dropped down into the little cove.  They all felt beaten and limp, as if they had been playing a violent but not heating game of football.  Even Nan’s energy was drained.

Gerda said with chattering teeth, as she and Nan dressed in their rocky corner, “I suppose, Nan, if it hadn’t been for you and Barry, I’d have drowned.”

“Well, I suppose perhaps you would.  If you come to think of it, we’d most of us be dying suddenly half the time if it weren’t for something—­some chance or other.”

Gerda said “Thanks awfully, Nan,” in her direct, childlike way, and Nan turned it off with “You might have thanked me if you had drowned, seeing it was my fault we bathed there at all.  I ought to have known it wasn’t safe for you or Kay.”

Looking at the little fragile figure shivering in its vest, Nan felt in that moment no malice, no triumph, no rivalry, no jealous anger; nothing but the protecting care for the smaller and weaker, for Neville’s little pretty, precious child that she had felt when Gerda’s hand clutched her shoulder in the sea.

“Life-saving seems to soften the heart,” she reflected, grimly, conscious as always of her own reactions.

“Well,” said Kay weakly, as they climbed up the cliff path to the little village, “I do call that a rotten bathe.  Now let’s make for the pub and drink whiskey.”

7

It was three days later.  They had spent an afternoon and a night at Polperro, and the sun shone in the morning on that incredible place as they rode out of it after breakfast.  Polperro shakes the soul and the aesthetic nerves like a glass of old wine; no one can survey it unmoved, or leave it as he entered it, any more than you can come out of a fairy ring as you went in.  In the afternoon they had bathed in the rock pools along the coast.  In the evening the moon had magically gleamed on the little town, and Barry and Gerda had sat together on the beach watching it, and then in the dawn they had risen (Barry and Gerda again) and rowed out in a boat to watch the pilchard haul, returning at breakfast time sleepy, fishy and bright-eyed.

As they climbed the steep hill path that leads to Talland, the sun danced on the little harbour with its fishing-boats and its sad, crowding, crying gulls, and on the huddled white town with its narrow crooked streets and overhanging houses:  Polperro had the eerie beauty of a dream or of a little foreign port.  Such beauty and charm are on the edge of pain; you cannot disentangle them from it.  They intoxicate, and pierce to tears.  The warm morning sun sparkled on a still blue sea, and burned the gorse and bracken by the steep path’s edge to fragrance.  So steep the path was that they had to push their bicycles up it with bent backs and labouring steps, so narrow that they had to go in single file.  It was never meant for cyclists, only for walkers; the bicycling road ran far inland.