cromlech where Philip's friend had sat,
and with smiling lips and swimming eyes she watched the young men until
they were lost to view.

Her eyes wandered over the sea. How immense it was, how mysterious, how
it begot in one feelings both of love and of awe! At this moment she was
not in sympathy with its wonderful calm. There had been times when she
seemed of it, part of it, absorbed by it, till it flowed over her soul
and wrapped her in a deep content. Now all was different. Mystery and
the million happenings of life lay hidden in that far silver haze. On
the brink of such a sea her mind seemed to be hovering now. Nothing was
defined, nothing was clear. She was too agitated to think; life, being,
was one wide, vague sensation, partly delight, partly trepidation.
Everything had a bright tremulousness. This mystery was no dark cloud,
it was a shaking, glittering mist, and yet there rose from it an air
which made her pulse beat hard, her breath come with joyous lightness.
She was growing to a new consciousness; a new glass, through which to
see life, was quickly being adjusted to her inner sight.

Many a time, with her mother, she had sat upon the shore at St. Aubin's
Bay, and looked out where white sails fluttered like the wings of
restless doves. Nearer, maybe just beneath her, there had risen the keen
singing of the saw, and she could see the white flash of the adze as it
shaped the beams; the skeleton of a noble ship being covered with its
flesh of wood, and veined with iron; the tall masts quivering to their
places as the workmen hauled at the pulleys, singing snatches of patois
rhymes. She had seen more than one ship launched, and a strange shiver
of pleasure and of pain had gone through her; for as the water caught
the graceful figure of the vessel, and the wind bellied out the sails,
it seemed to her as if some ship of her own hopes were going out between
the reefs to the open sea. What would her ship bring back again to her?
Or would anything ever come back?

The books of adventure, poetry, history, and mythology she had read with
her mother had quickened her mind, sharpened her intuition, had made her
temperament still more sensitive--and her heart less peaceful. In her
was almost every note of human feeling: home and duty, song and gaiety,
daring and neighbourly kindness, love of sky and sea and air and
orchards, of the good-smelling earth and wholesome animal life, and all
the incidents, tragic, comic, or c