"Nanny! Nanny!" he cried, sobbing the words out on the crest of each
gasping breath.

The waves came round her. She was a rock. She was covered with the
seaweed which pops when it is pressed. He was lost.

There he stood. His face composed itself. He was about to roar when,
lying among the black sticks and straw under the cliff, he saw a whole
skull--perhaps a cow's skull, a skull, perhaps, with the teeth in it.
Sobbing, but absent-mindedly, he ran farther and farther away until he
held the skull in his arms.

"There he is!" cried Mrs. Flanders, coming round the rock and covering
the whole space of the beach in a few seconds. "What has he got hold of?
Put it down, Jacob! Drop it this moment! Something horrid, I know. Why
didn't you stay with us? Naughty little boy! Now put it down. Now come
along both of you," and she swept round, holding Archer by one hand and
fumbling for Jacob's arm with the other. But he ducked down and picked
up the sheep's jaw, which was loose.

Swinging her bag, clutching her parasol, holding Archer's hand, and
telling the story of the gunpowder explosion in which poor Mr. Curnow
had lost his eye, Mrs. Flanders hurried up the steep lane, aware all the
time in the depths of her mind of some buried discomfort.

There on the sand not far from the lovers lay the old sheep's skull
without its jaw. Clean, white, wind-swept, sand-rubbed, a more
unpolluted piece of bone existed nowhere on the coast of Cornwall. The
sea holly would grow through the eye-sockets; it would turn to powder,
or some golfer, hitting his ball one fine day, would disperse a little