out of the water, sleek and dripping as a seal; and as she swung her short coarse hair back from her face she saw hands, and Gordon’s voice said:
“Give me your hands.”
She clasped his hard wrists and felt herself flying. The setting sun came level into his beard and upon all his tall lean body, and dripping water on the deck she stood and looked at him with admiration. “Gee, you’re hard,” she said. She touched his forearms again, then she struck him with her fist on his hard high chest. “Do it again, will you?”
“Swing you again?” he asked. But she was already in the tender, extending her arms while sunset was a moist gold sheathing her. Again that sensation of flying, of space and motion and his hard hands coming into it; and for an instant she stopped in midflight, hand to hand and arm braced to arm, high above the deck while water dripping from her turned to gold as it fell. Sunset was in his eyes: a glory he could not see; and her taut simple body, almost breastless and with the fleeting hips of a boy, was an ecstasy in golden marble, and in her face the passionate ecstasy of a child.
At last her feet touched the deck again and she turned. She sped toward the companionway and as she flashed downward the last of the sun slid upon her and over her with joy. Then she was gone, and Gordon stood looking at the wet and simple prints of her naked feet on the deck.
six o'clock
They had raised land just about the time Major Ayers won his wager, and while the last of day drained out of the world the Nausikaa at halfspeed forged slowly into a sluggish river mouth, broaching a timeless violet twilight between solemn bearded cypresses motionless as bronze. You might, by lis-
