So now they lounged in the forward pilotchair, looking through the clear orb of the piscine eye at silvery-clouds of water vapour, and pretended a light, airy tone. "Jean, my beloved, are you well and ready to go?"

Early mornings, before the tourists show up, Gordon Barrow likes to lean against the hotel roof and watch the trains. There are two of them, each carriage as big as his size seven shoes, and they circle the village at a leisurely pace, with a gap of about nine or ten feet in between them. Today, nearing winter, steam wreathes the whole track, and the engines race onwards through each other's ghost.

The Moon travels endlessly above the world now, searching in vain and unable to see through the waters that tie the Lady down. And as he moves across the sky, so she yearns to be with him, the oceans swelling and shifting so they can be closer. That's how the tides begun and how they were named: yearning tide and weeping tide, lovers' tide and mourners' tide.