1. AT THE BAY.
Chapter 1.I.
Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of
Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big bush-covered
hills at the back were smothered. You could not see where they ended
and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy road was gone and
the paddocks and bungalows the other side of it; there were no white
dunes covered with reddish grass beyond them; there was nothing to mark
which was beach and where was the sea. A heavy dew had fallen. The
grass was blue. Big drops hung on the bushes and just did not fall; the
silvery, fluffy toi-toi was limp on its long stalks, and all the marigolds and
the pinks in the bungalow gardens were bowed to the earth with wetness.
Drenched were the cold fuchsias, round pearls of dew lay on the flat
nasturtium leaves. It looked as though the sea had beaten up softly in the
darkness, as though one immense wave had come rippling, rippling--how
far? Perhaps if you had waked up in the middle of the night you might
have seen a big fish flicking in at the window and gone again...
Ah-Aah! sounded the sleepy sea. And from the bush there came the
sound of little streams flowing, quickly, lightly, slipping between the
smooth stones, gushing into ferny basins and out again; and there was the
splashing of big drops on large leaves, and something else--what was it?--
a faint stirring and shaking, the snapping of a twig and then such silence
that it seemed some one was listening