break which Mr. Fern had been getting ready to buy
when he had been forced, so unexpectedly, to change his mind.

If the world had been searched, perhaps, no greater contrast to
Rivington could have been found than this delightful colony of
quicksands, full of life and motion and colour, where everybody was
beautifully dressed and enjoying themselves. For a whole week after
her instalment Honora was in a continual state of excitement and
anticipation, and the sound of wheels and voices on the highroad beyond
the hedge sent her peeping to her curtains a dozen times a day. The
waking hours, instead of burdens, were so many fleeting joys. In
the morning she awoke to breathe a new, perplexing, and delicious
perfume--the salt sea breeze stirring her curtains: later, she was on
the gay, yellow-ochre beach with Lily Dallam, making new acquaintances;
and presently stepping, with a quiver of fear akin to delight, into the
restless, limitless blue water that stretched southward under a milky
haze: luncheon somewhere, more new acquaintances, and then, perhaps, in
Lily's light wood victoria to meet the train of trains. For at half-past
five the little station, forlorn all day long in the midst of the
twisted cedars that grew out of the heated sand, assumed an air of
gayety and animation. Vehicles of all sorts drew up in the open space
before it, wagonettes, phaetons, victorias, high wheeled hackney carts,
and low Hempstead carts: women in white summer gowns and veils compared
notes, or shouted invitations to dinner from carriage to carriage. The
engine rolled in with a great cloud of dust, the horses danced, the
husbands and the overnight guests, grimy and brandishing evening
newspapers, poured out of the special car where they had sat in
arm-chairs and talked stocks all the way from Long Island City. Some
were driven home, it is true; some to the beach, and others to
the Quicksands Club, where they continued their discussions over
whiskey-and-sodas until it was time to have a cocktail and dress for
dinner.

Then came the memorable evening when Lily Dallam gave a dinner in honour
of Honora, her real introduction to Quicksands. It was characteristic of
Lily that her touch made the desert bloom. Three years before Quicksands
had gasped to hear that the Sidney Dallams had bought the Faraday
house--or rather what remained of it.

"We got it for nothing," Lily explained triumphantly on the occasion of
Honora's first admiring view. "N