Mijnheer stopped to look at the merry-go-round; he admired the cheerful tune that it played.  He was not a connoisseur of music; a barrel-organ was as good to him as the organ in the Groote Kerk.  The others stopped too; Anna exclaimed on the life-like and clever appearance of the bobbing horses, whereupon her father suggested that perhaps the girls would like to try a ride on the machine, and then befel the crowning mischief of the evening.  Julia and Anna accepted the proposal readily.  Denah declined; she felt in no humour for it; also she thought a refusal showed a superior mind—­one likely to appeal to a serious young man, who had no taste for the gaudy, gay, or fast, and who also had a tendency towards seasickness.  But, alas, for the fickleness of man!  While Denah stood with her father and Mijnheer, Julia rode round the centre of lighted mirrors on a prancing wooden horse, and Joost—­the serious, the sometimes seasick—­rode beside her on a dappled grey, to the familiar old English tune, “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-a.”

CHAPTER IX

THE HOLIDAY

The Dunes lay some little distance from the town, a low, but suddenly-rising hill boundary, that shut in the basin of flat land.  They were all of pure sand, though in many places so matted with vegetation that it was hardly recognisable as such.  Trees grew in places, especially on the side that fronted towards the town; the way up lay through a dense young wood of beech and larch, and a short, broad-leafed variety of poplar.  There was no undergrowth, but between the dead leaves one could see that a dark green, short-piled moss had managed to find a hold here and there, though so smooth was it that it looked more like old enamel than a natural growth.  The trees had the appearance of high summer, deeply, intensely green, so that they seemed almost blackish in mass.  There was no breeze among them; even the dapples of sunlight which found their way through the roof of leaves hardly stirred, but lay in light patches, like scattered gold upon the ground.  Flies and gnats moved and shimmered, a busy life, whose small voices were the only sound to be heard; all else was very still, with the glorious reposeful stillness of full summer; not oppressive, without weariness or exhaustion, rather as if the whole creation paused at this zenith to look round on its works, and beheld and saw that they were all very good.

There were no clear paths, apparently few people went that way; certainly there was no one about when Julia and Rawson-Clew came.  It is true they saw a kind of little beer-garden at the foot of the slope, but there was no one idling about it.

“We shall have to come back here for lunch,” Julia said.

And when he suggested that it was rather a pity to have to retrace their steps, she answered, “It doesn’t matter, we are not going anywhere particular; we may just as well wander one way as another.  When we get to the top this time we will explore to the right, and when we get there again after lunch, we will go to the left; don’t you think that is the best way?  This is to be a holiday, you know.”