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wish.”
    â€œOh no.” Jane shrank back instinctively.
    In the same moment a cluster of four young women broke away from the crowd and ran to the broad, shadowy leaf-image. They were shaking with giggles, calling to one another; one, larger and noisier than the rest, rushed up and clasped the hawthorn sides that stretched far above her head.
    â€œSend us all rich husbands, Greenwitch, pray thi’!” she shouted.
    â€œOr else send her young Jim Tregoney!” bellowed another. Shrieking with laughter, they all ran back to the group.
    â€œSee there!” said the woman. “No harm comes to the foolish, which is most of them. And therefore none to those with understanding. Will you come?”
    She walked over to the big silent figure, laid a hand on it, and said something that Jane could not hear.
    Nervously Jane followed. As she came close to the Greenwitch she felt again the unimaginable force it seemed to represent, but again the great loneliness too. Melancholy seemed to hover about it like a mist. She put out her hand to grasp a hawthorn bough, and paused. “Oh dear,” she said impulsively, “I wish you could be happy.”
    She thought, as she said it: how babyish, when you could have wished for anything, even getting the grail back . . . even if it’s all a lot of rubbish, you could at least have tried. . . . But the hard-eyed Cornishwoman was looking at her with an odd surprised kind of approval.
    â€œA perilous wish!” she said. “For where one may be made happy by harmless things, another may find happiness only in hurting. But good may come of it.”
    Jane could think of nothing to say. She felt suddenly extremely silly.
    Then she thought she heard a muffled throbbing sound out at sea; she swung round. The woman too was looking outward,at a grey streak of horizon where none had been before. Out on the dark sea, lights were flickering, white and red and green. The first fishermen were coming home.
    Afterwards, Jane remembered little of that long waiting time. The air was cold. Slowly, slowly, the fishing-boats came closer, over the stone-grey sea glimmering in the cold dawn. And then, when at last they neared the wharf, the village seemed to splutter into life. Lights and voices woke on the jetties; engines coughed; the air was filled with shouting and laughing and a great bustle of unloading; and over all of it the gulls wheeled and screamed, early-woken for thievery, eddying in a great white cloud round the boats to dive for discarded fish. Afterwards, Jane found herself remembering the gulls most of all.
    Up from the harbour, when the unloading was done, and lorries gone to market and boxes gone into the little canning factory—up from the harbour came a procession of the fishermen. There were others too, factory men and mechanics and shopkeepers and farmers, all the men of Trewissick, but the dark-jerseyed fishermen, shadow-eyed, bristle-chinned, weary, smelling of fish, led the long crowd. They came along the headland, calling cheerfully to the women; no meeting could have been less romantic, Jane thought, up there in the sleepless cold under the dead grey light of the dawn, and yet there was a great light-heartedness among them all. The bonfire still burned, a last stock of wood newly blazing; the men gathered round it, rubbing their hands, in a tumult of deep voices that sounded harsh in Jane’s ears after the lighter chattering of the women all night.
    High and low in the sky the gulls drifted, uncertain, hopeful. Amongst all the bustle stood the Greenwitch, vast and silent, a little diminished by light and noise but still brooding, ominous. Despite all the raucous exchanges tossed between the men and women there was a curious respectfulness towardsthe strange leafy image; a clear reluctance to make any fun of the Greenwitch. Jane found that for some reason this left her feeling relieved.
    She caught sight of Merriman’s tall figure at the