“Children,” whispered Mrs. Cole, “very quietly now, so that you don't disturb anyone, run off to the farther beach and play. Helen, you'll see that everything is all right, won't you?”

It was only just in time that Jeremy succeeded in strangling Hamlet's bark into a snort, and even then they all looked round for a moment at the sleepers in the greatest anxiety. But no, they had not been disturbed. If only Mr. Le Page could have known what he resembled lying there with his mouth open! But he did not know. He was doubtless dreaming of his property.

The children crept away. Charlotte and Jeremy together. Jeremy's heart beat thickly. At last he had the lovely creature in his charge. It was true that he did not quite know what he was going to do with her, and that even now, in the height of his admiration, he did wish that she would not walk as though she were treading on red-hot ploughshares, and that she could talk a little instead of giving little shivers of apprehension at every step.

“I must say,” he thought to himself, “she's rather silly in some ways. Perhaps it wouldn't be fun to see her always.”

They turned the corner round a projecting finger of rock, and a new little beach, white and gleaming, lay in front of them.

“Well,” said Jeremy, “here we are. What shall we play?”

There was dead silence.

“We might play pirates,” he continued. “I'll be the pirate, and Mary can sit on that rock until the water comes round her, and Charlotte shall hide in that cave—”

There was still silence. Looking about him, he discovered from his sisters' countenances that they were resolved to lend no kind of assistance, and he then from that deduced the simple fact that his sisters hated Charlotte and were not going to make it pleasant for her in any way if they could help it. Oh! it was a miserable picnic! The worst that he'd ever had.

“It's too hot to play,” said Helen loftily. “I'm going to sit down over there.”

“So am I,” said Mary.

They moved away, their heads in the air and their legs ridiculously stiff.

Jeremy gazed at Charlotte in distress. It was very wicked of his sisters to go off like that, but it was also very silly of Charlotte to stand there so helplessly. He was beginning to think that perhaps he would give the thimble to Miss Jones after all.

“Would you like to go and see the pool where the little crabs are?” he asked.

“I don't know,” she answered, her upper lip trembling as though she were going to cry. “I want to go home with Mother.”

“You can't go home,” he said firmly, “and you can't see your mother, because she's asleep.”

“I've made my shoes dirty,” she said, looking down at her feet, “and I'm so tired of holding my sunshade.”

“I should shut it up,” Jeremy said without any hesitation. “I think it's a silly thing. I'm glad I'm not a girl. Do you have to take it with you everywhere?”

“Not if it's raining. Then I have an umbrella.”

“I think you'd better come and see the crabs,” he settled. “They're only just over there.”

She moved along with him reluctantly, looking back continually to where her mother ought to be.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” Jeremy asked politely.

“No,” she said, without any hesitation, “I want to go home.”

“She's as selfish as anything,” he thought to himself. “We're giving the party, and she ought to have said 'Yes' even if she wasn't.”

“Do you like my dog?” he asked, with another effort at light conversation.

“No,” she answered, with a little shiver. “He's ugly.”

“He isn't ugly,” Jeremy returned indignantly. “He isn't perhaps the very best breed, but Uncle Samuel says that that doesn't matter if he's clever. He's better than any other dog. I love him more than anybody. He isn't ugly!”

“He is,” cried Charlotte with a kind of wail. “Oh! I want to go home.”

“Well, you can't go home,” he answered her fiercely. “So you needn't think about it.”

They came to the little pools, three of them, now clear as crystal, blue on their surface, with green depths and red shelving rock.

“Now you sit there,” he said cheerfully. “No one will touch you. The crabs won't get at you.”

He looked about him and noticed with surprise where he was. He was sitting on the farther corner of the very beach where the Scarlet Admiral had landed with his men. It was out there beyond that bend of rock that the wonderful ship had rode, with its gold and silk, its jewelled masts and its glittering board. Directly opposite to him was the little green path that led up the hill, and above it the very field—Farmer Ede's field!

For a long, long time they sat there in silence. He forgot Charlotte in his interest over his discovery, staring about him and watching how quickly the August afternoon was losing its heat and colour, so that already a little cold autumnal wind was playing about the sand, the colours were being drawn from the sky, and a grey web was slowly pulled across the sea.

“Now,” he said cheerfully at last, to Charlotte, “I'll look for the crabs.”

“I hate crabs,” she said. “I want to go home.”

“You can't go home,” he answered furiously. “What's the good of saying that over and over again? You aren't going yet, so it's no use saying you are.”

“You're a horrid little boy,” she brought out with a kind of inanimate sob.

He did not reply to that; he was still trying to behave like a gentleman. How could he ever have liked her? Why, her hair was not so much after all. What was hair when you come to think of it? Mary got on quite well with hers, ugly though it was. She was stupid, stupid, stupid! She was like someone dead. As he searched for the crabs that weren't there he felt his temper growing. Soon he would lead her back to her mother and leave her there and never see her again.

But this was not the climax of the afternoon.

When he looked up from gazing into the pool the whole world seemed to have changed. He was still dazzled perhaps by the reflection of the water in his eyes, and yet it was not altogether that. It was not altogether because the day was slipping from afternoon into evening.

The lazy ripple of the water as it slutched up the sand and then broke, the shadows that were creeping farther and farther from rock to rock, the green light that pushed up from the horizon into the faint blue, the grey web of the sea, the thick gathering of the hills as they crept more closely about the little darkening beach... it was none of these things.

He began hurriedly to tell Charlotte about the Scarlet Admiral. Even as he told her he was himself caught into the excitement of the narration. He forgot her; he did not see her white cheeks, her mouth open with terror, an expression new to her, that her face had never known before, stealing into her eyes. He told her how the Fool had seen the ship, how the Admiral had landed, then left his men on the beach, how he had climbed the little green path, how the young man had followed him, how they had fought, how the young man had fallen. What was that? Jeremy jumped from his rock. “I say, did you hear anything?”

And that was enough for Charlotte. With one scream, a scream such as she had never uttered in her life before, sue turned, and then, running as indeed she had never run before, she stumbled, half fell, stumbled, finally ran as though the whole world of her ghosts was behind her. Her screams were so piercing that they may well have startled, the villagers of Rafiel.

Jeremy followed her, but his mind was not with her. Was he going to see something? What was it? Who was it?

Then the awful catastrophe that finished the afternoon occurred. Turning the corner of the rock, Charlotte missed her footing and fell straight into a pool. Jeremy, Mary and Helen were upon her almost as she fell. They dragged her out, but alas! what a sight was there! Instead of the beautiful and magnificent Charlotte there was a bedraggled and dirty little girl.

But also, instead of an inanimate and lifeless doll, there was at last a human being, a terrified soul.

The scene that followed passes all power of description. Mrs. Le Page wailed like a lost spirit; Mr. Le Page was so rude to Mr. Cole that it might confidently be said that those two gentlemen would never speak to one another again. Mrs. Cole, dismayed though she was, had some fatalistic consolation that she had known from the first that the picnic would be a most dreadful failure and that the worst had occurred; there was no more to come.

Everyone was too deeply occupied to scold Jeremy. They all moved up to the farm, Charlotte behaving most strangely, even striking her mother and crying: “Let me go! Let me go! I don't want to be clean! I'm frightened! I'm frightened!”

Jeremy hung behind the others. At the bottom of the little lane he stood and waited. Was there a figure coming up through the dusk? Did someone pass him? Why did he suddenly feel no longer afraid, but only reassured and with the strangest certainty that the lane, the beach, the field belonged to him now? He would come there and live when he grew up. He would come often. Had the Scarlet Admiral passed him? If not the Scarlet Admiral, then the other.

The sea picnic had, after all, been not quite a misfortune.

Jeremy had been made free of the land.

And Charlotte? Charlotte had been woken up, and never would go to sleep again.