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Then an artist had discovered Quinton-by-the-Sea. He took a painting of it back to the restless town, a painting full of color of dune, sea, bay, and hundred-toned Hills, with never a tree to stay the progress of the unending breezes. That was sufficient! The artist was great enough to touch the heart and Quinton was doomed to be famous! But it was only the beginning now.
It had happened so instantly. First that great hulking figure in front of him, the sneering laugh, that last sentence, "Let her rot . . . my dear Dune, your chivalry does you credit." Then that black, blinding, surging rage and the blow that followed. He did not know what he had intended to do.
Some sort of argument was going on as the officers approached, and in passing they heard the finish of it. "You were pit there tae warn folk," a Highlander was saying. "Weel, ye've dune that, so we'll awa on oor road. We're nae fonder o' shells than y'are yersel. But we'd look bonnie, wouldn't we, t' be tellin' the Cameron lads we promised to meet, that we were feared for a bit shellin'...."
The shadows of the grass formed a fixed metallic design on the sand. But I heard the whisper again, and with a side glance caught the dune stealthily on the move. It was alive. When you were not attentive, some of its grains would start furtively, pour in increasing mobility fanwise, and rest instantly when looked at. This hill was fluid, and circulated.
He did not realise that the sand dune belonged to Eloise, and that she was wont to sit there with Doctor Conrad, out of the wind, and safely screened from the argus-eyed rocking-chairs on the veranda. He was so preoccupied that he did not even hear the sound of their voices as they approached. Turning the corner quickly, they almost stumbled over him. "Upon my word," cried Eloise.
Certainly the trenches in Flanders were not at all like the photographs we had seen. At the Aisne the soil is chalk and limestone and the country broken and rolling. In Flanders, on the other hand, the soil is sticky, yellow clay, and the land flat with the exception of an occasional sand dune like an inverted pudding dish, at intervals of about ten or fifteen miles apart.
One may think that crawling on the sand is easy; well, all I can say to those who think so is, "Try it." I soon found it was not so easy as it looked, especially under conditions where the raising of one's body two or three inches above the top of the dune might be possibly asking for a bullet through it, and drawing a concentrated fire in one's direction.
He must go up to the House: who could tell what might not be going on there? He drew in his line, purposing to take the best of the fish to Miss Horn and some to Mrs. Courthope, as in the old days. The Psyche still lay on the sands, and he was rowing the dinghy toward her, when, looking round to direct his course, he thought he caught a glimpse of some one seated on the slope of the dune.
Didna I see Gentle Geordie trying to get other folk out of the Tolbooth forbye Jock Porteous? Ye needna look sae amazed. I ken mair things than that, maybe." "O my God, my God!" said she, throwing herself on her knees before him. "D'ye ken where they hae putten my bairn? O my bairn, my bairn! Tell me wha has taen't away, or what they hae dune wi't!"
"Oh, yes, I'm well," he said, "never better. Come along to the summer house and let's put a dune between us and those vultures." He led her down a flight of stone steps and over a stretch of undulating dry sand to the place where Hosack invariably read the morning paper and to which his servants led their village beaux when the moon was up, there to give far too faithful imitations of the hyena.