The Mermaid's Home
Mavis and Francis voted for the edge of the rocks where the words had once already been so successfully spoken. Bernard said, "Why not here where we are?" Kathleen said rather sadly that any place would do as long as the Mermaid came when she was called. But Reuben, standing sturdily in his girl's clothes, said:
"Look 'ere. When you've run away like what I have, least said soonest mended, and out of sight's out of mind. What about caves?"
"Caves are too dry, except at high tide," said Francis. "And then they're too wet. Much."
"Not all caves," Reuben reminded him. "If we was to turn and go up by the cliff path. There's a cave up there. I hid in it t'other day. Quite dry, except in one corner, and there it's as wet as you want—a sort of 'orse trough in the rocks it looks like—only deep."
"Is it seawater?" Mavis asked anxiously. And Reuben said:
"Bound to be, so near the sea and all."
But it wasn't. For when they had climbed the cliff path and Reuben had shown them where to turn aside from it, and had put aside the brambles and furze that quite hid the cave's mouth, Francis saw at once that the water here could not be seawater. It was too far above the line which the waves reached, even in the stormiest weather.
"So it's no use," he explained.
But the others said, "Oh, do let's try, now we are here," and they went on into the dusky twilight of the cave.
It was a very pretty cave, not chalk, like the cliffs, but roofed and walled with gray flints such as the houses and churches are built of that you see on the downs near Brighton and Eastbourne.
"This isn't an accidental cave, you know," said Bernard importantly; "it's built by the hand of man in distant ages, like Stonehenge and the Cheesewring and Kit's Coty House."
The cave was lighted from the entrance where the sunshine
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