Page:Rideout--Beached keels.djvu/60

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46
BEACHED KEELS

to go back, and they stay and talk. I like them very much, though my father does n't."

Her happiness was truth itself. She had forgotten whatever troubles the night before or the morning might have contained.

Far below in the cove lay the long red curve of the beach, with a thin black line of dead seaweed drawn as if by a compass along the high-water mark. The tide was beginning to ebb, but near the shore a "back eddy" moved toward them, and with it a strange multitudinous plashing, like continual waves among myriads of tiny rocks.

"Oh, look!" she cried, plucking him by the sleeve. "See the herring!" Familiarity could have made the sight no less beautiful to her.

Where the spurs of the cliff sprang upward from the cove, the turmoil was working toward them over the water. Countless tongues of silver flame leapt up, fell, leapt, and advanced with the same continuous plashing; here and there the curved flash of little bodies wove swiftly in and out of water, pliant threads of white fire. It was like a