It was like that then, the island, thought Cam, once more drawing herfingers through the waves. She had never seen it from out at sea before.

　　It lay like that on the sea, did it, with a dent in the middle and two sharpcrags, and the sea swept in there, and spread away for miles and mileson either side of the island. It was very small; shaped something like aleaf stood on end. So we took a little boat, she thought, beginning to tellherself a story of adventure about escaping from a sinking ship. But withthe sea streaming through her fingers, a spray of seaweed vanishing behindthem, she did not want to tell herself seriously a story; it was thesense of adventure and escape that she wanted, for she was thinking, asthe boat sailed on, how her father's anger about the points of the compass,James's obstinacy about the compact, and her own anguish, all hadslipped, all had passed, all had streamed away. What then came next?

　　Where were they going? From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea,there spurted up a fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, at the adventure(that she should be alive, that she should be there). And thedrops falling from this sudden and unthinking fountain of joy fell hereand there on the dark, the slumbrous shapes in her mind; shapes of aworld not realised but turning in their darkness, catching here and there,a spark of light; Greece, Rome, Constantinople. Small as it was, andshaped something like a leaf stood on its end with the gold-sprinkledwaters flowing in and about it, it had, she supposed, a place in the universe—even that little island? The old gentlemen in the study shethought could have told her. Sometimes she strayed in from the gardenpurposely to catch them at it. There they were (it might be Mr Carmichaelor Mr Bankes who was sitting with her father) sitting opposite eachother in their low arm-chairs. They were crackling in front of them thepages of THE TIMES, when she came in from the garden, all in amuddle, about something some one had said about Christ, or hearingthat a mammoth had been dug up in a London street, or wonderingwhat Napoleon was like. Then they took all this with their clean hands(they wore grey-coloured clothes; they smelt of heather) and theybrushed the scraps together, turning the paper, crossing their knees, andsaid something now and then very brief. Just to please herself she wouldtake a book from the shelf and stand there, watching her father write, soequally, so neatly from one side of the page to another, with a littlecough now and then, or something said briefly to the other old gentlemanopposite. And she thought, standing there with her book open, onecould let whatever one thought expand here like a leaf in water; and if itdid w............