Even the flowers were too delicate for her mood. She needed to plunge her lips into the salt, to grip tough roots with her hands, rock. Strength, she longed for strength, might of wind, surge of clamorous surf. All the wildness of her spirit night liberated with a touch. She stood; all eagerness, all longing, just to smell tar, to feel rope, not to watch but to battle with the waves. Yet the door was locked; she could only wait at the window, desolate with lost adventure, desolate with a boyishness that might never put to sea, denied the secrets of the wind and dawn a sailor has by heart.

Clouds drew over the moon. The islands slept.

Sunset carved the eastern islands out of grape-blue darkness with a gold knife. For a last moment, on the rose-red stone-crop of Ganilly, day remembered noon. Black seals dived for fish in a purity of green water left by the sand beneath. The distant mainland and the distant waves deepened with night.

Nancy stared out seawards as though adventure waited her at the horizon. She was living a dream near to the immortality she loved. It was evil to think of beauty as tainted by any

transience, but wind, if it stilled, passed into another wind, the sea slept and knew not death. Evening was ready to flower above the ridges of the water, drop after drop of honey, light spilled into the foam. Between the islands, almost beyond sight, the swift, beautiful outline of a ship followed the swifter day.

The wildness of the hour took Nancy's heart in its strong grasp. She stared at the mainland, rigid with rebellion. Winter, desolate hours she fought to keep even dream; how had she failed that she must face them year after arid year? It was only her ignorance that kept her from expression; always to watch, never to feel. She needed a future that would hold no sting, no bondage; to slip free of the old hours and all their fetters, to kick aside existence and clutch life. What was strength that she should fear it, what was roughness? It was better to know the beauty in bitterness than to freeze into a tranquillity that had turned away from truth.

Cold water tossed seawards beyond the black drifters, beyond the harbour wall. Nancy shook the water from her oilskins; spray burst over the bows of the launch. All she had known of liberty, all she had read, lands of wide grass, rough hills, open beaches, the

wildness that was freedom, sharpened her desire. With a sudden moment even the islands were too small for her. It was there, out there, she longed to be, out at the horizon -following the wind until her spirit broke beyond morning, in the great hunger for a new world that is the impulse of all discovery.

She felt a sailor as they landed on the rough stones of a harbour that was a link between the dark, unconquered life of the drifter cabins and the stone cottages of the dwellers by the shore. Seamen passed up and down, with ropes in their hands or nets; the spirit of the sea about their salt-encrusted clothes. It was a page torn living from some book of old adventure; never free of the smell of fish, of ships, of tar, all the queer sea-scents that pierced Nancy with a strange, a sudden longing for a world she could never know. She looked once to the single scarlet flower the sky lifted above the waves, then turned; angry her joy should be as transient as light, hurt that she might never make achievement of a dream. Yet truth lived, the truth that was adventure, the truth sailors surprised at dawn when morning opened over the far coasts of the world.

Why was she born with a boy's heart when she might not go to sea?

CHAPTER V

THE COLOUR OF WORDS

EVER Since Nancy could remember, all words, as she heard or read them, appeared to her as colour. It was as natural as breathing, so thoroughly an element of her mind that it was only by accident she discovered, at fifteen, they were printed symbols to the multitude, and to speak of them as gold or crimson merely provoked derision. It was not until nine years later that she found she was simply a colour hearer and that, while it was not common to every one, as she had at first imagined, it was not confined to the few, but was, in one form or another, fairly prevalent.

It was impossible to think of the alphabet as colourless. Often she questioned people, "What do words mean to you; how do you see them?" Yet this was useless; despite proof and reasoning her thought compelled her

to credit all minds with this sense of colour audition.

Natural objects apart, which kept their actual hue, the initial letter gave the word its colour, but there were exceptions to this rule. Contrary to the French examples in the books she read, vowels were indecisive; it was the consonants that made a page as vivid as a sunset. Seven letters were white, C, G, Q, S, T, O, and U; three of the others were black, D, E, and I. W was crimson; H, M, and Y were various shades of gold and primrose. B changed from raspberry to umber, N was the rich tint of a red squirrel, F and J were a deeper brown. Other letters brought blue, as sharp as a broken wave, as dark as Alpine gentian. R was rose; A and P seemed too weak to be definite and varied with different words, though with names of places or people A was occasionally iris - blue or scarlet.

Often the consonants would mingle to form some complex colour, purple or a lazuli dusted over with frost. The wind, blown between the surf trees, was sharp with blue or silver; brought her petals, as she closed her eyes and listened, the white petals of narcissus. Heavy sounds were thick umber or grey; the singing