ppealed to the girl as few things did. As,
long ago, her father had gloried in the coming of summer to the South,
she gloried in it now. She looked across the Pool of the Saint to the
flood of yellow that was like sunlight given a body upon the cliff
opposite, and her soul revelled within her, and her heart rose up and
danced, alone, and yet as if in a glad company of dancers, all of whom
were friends. Her brain, too, sprang to the alert. The sun increased the
feeling of intelligence within her.

And then she thought of her room, of the hours she passed shut in there,
and she was torn by opposing impulses.

But she told no one of them. Vere could keep her secrets although she
was a girl.

How the sea welcomed the summer! To many this home on the island would
have seemed an arid, inhospitable place, desolate and lost amid a cruel
world of cliffs and waters. It was not so to Vere. For she entered into
the life of the sea. She knew all its phases, as one may know all the
moods of a person loved. She knew when she would find it intensely calm,
at early morning and when the evening approached. At a certain hour,
with a curious regularity, the breeze came, generally from Ischia, and
turned it to vivacity. A temper that was almost frivolous then possessed
it, and it broke into gayeties like a child's. The waves were small, but
they were impertinently lively. They made a turmoil such as urchins make
at play. Heedless of reverence, but not consciously impious, they flung
themselves at the feet of San Francesco, casting up a tiny tribute of
spray into the sun.

Then Vere thought that the Saint looked down with pleasure at them, as a
good old man looks at a crowd of laughing children who have run against
him in the street, remembering his own youth. For even the Saints were
young! And, after that, surely the waves were a little less boisterous.
She thought she noted a greater calm. But perhaps it was only that the
breeze was dying down as the afternoon wore on.

She often sat and wondered which she loved best--the calm that lay upon
the sea at dawn, or the calm that was the prelude to the night. Silvery
were these dawns of the summer days. Here and there the waters gleamed
like the scales of some lovely fish. Mysterious lights, like those in
the breast of the opal, shone in the breast of the sea, stirred,
surely travelled as if endowed with life, then sank away to the far-off
kingdoms that man may never look on. Those dawns d