doubt and darkness to the very end.

She was not of the race of hero-women, who deserve the most of men, and
are doomed to receive in grudging measure. A pliant, dependent,
essentially feminine creature, she was made to lean and look up, to be
swayed and influenced by the stronger nature, to be guided and ruled, and
led, and to love the guide.

Her nature had flowered: sun and breeze and dew had worked their miracle
of form and fragrance and colour, the ripened carpels waited, conscious of
the crown of tall golden-powdered anthers bending overhead. Instead of the
homely hive-bee a messenger had come from Heaven, the air vibrated yet
with the beating of celestial wings.

She was going to Saxham to ask him to forgive her, to throw down the
pitiless barrier she had reared between them in her ignorance of herself
and of him. She would humble herself to entreat for that rejected crown of
wifehood. Even though that conjectural other woman had won Owen from her,
she said to herself that she would win him back again.

She reached the wet, shining strip of creamy sand where the frothing line
of foam-horses reared and wallowed. The prints of her little brown shoes
were brimmed with sea-water, she lifted her skirt daintily, and went
forward still. Numberless delicate little winged shells were scattered
over the moist surface, tenantless homes of tiny bivalves, wonderfully
tinted. Rose-pink, brilliant yellow, tawny-white, delicate lilac, it was
as though a lapful of blossoms rifled from some mermaid's deep-sea garden,
had been scattered by the spoiler at old Ocean's marge. Lynette cried out
with pleasure at their beauty, stooped and gathered a palmful, then
dropped them. She stood a moment longer drinking in the keen, stinging
freshness, then turned to retrace her steps, still with that unseen
companion at her side.

The vast, undulating green and white expanse, save for a distant
golf-player with the inevitable ragged following, seemed bare of human
figures. The veering breeze shepherded flocks of white clouds across the
harebell-tinted meadows of the sky. It sang a thin, sweet song in
Lynette's little rose-tipped ears. And innumerable larks carolled,
building spiral towers of melody on fields of buoyant air. And suddenly a
human note mingled with their music and with the thick drone of the
little, black-and-grey humble-bees that feasted on the corn-bottles. And
Lynette's visionary companion was upon the instant gone.

It wa