for coming, are you?"

He looked down into her wistful, upturned face, and then away to the
distant line where sea and sky met. "No! I am not angry," he said
softly.

Adrea was very beautiful. The fresh sea air and the southern sun had
been as kind to her as to one of their own daughters. Only a very
faint, delicate shade of pink had stained her clear, transparent skin,
harmonising exquisitely with the slight olive hue of her complexion.
The strong breeze had loosened the coils of her dark hair, and it was
waving and flowing in picturesque freedom about her face. There was a
change, too, in her appearance, greater than any the wind or sun
could effect. Her dark eyes were glowing with a new life, and a soft,
wistful joy shone in her face. Those few days had been like heaven for
her. She had been alone, for the first time, with the man she loved;
sailing upon a sunlit sea hour after hour, with his voice ever in her
ears, and his tall figure by her side. The sense of his presence was
ever upon her, bringing with it a calm, sweet restfulness, a happiness
beyond anything which she had ever imagined.

And it was heaven, too, after hell! Thrust away in a dark corner of
her memory was the recollection of a day and a night full of grim,
phantasmal horrors, which were fast becoming little more than a dream
to her. The time was not yet come for remorse. In that deep glow of
passionate and self-forgetful devotion, quickened now into fullest
and sweetest life by his constant proximity, even sin itself, for his
sake, seemed justified to her. Everything, too, which lay behind her
brief stay in that bare, wind-swept country was fast assuming a far
distant place in her thoughts. It was such a change from her little
rooms in Grey Street, dainty and home-like though they had been, from
the brilliantly lit drawing-rooms where she had performed, and the
same wearisome compliments ever in her ears. The bonds of town life
had always galled her. She was an artist, although she had denied
it. She had become subject to her environment but it had been an
imprisonment. Nature was her mother, and Nature had claimed her now.
She knew it all; she knew that she could never be a dancer again. She
had stolen out on to the deck each morning in her slippers, and had
seen the dawn break through the clouds and descend upon the quivering
waters. She had seen the eastern sky streaked with faint but
marvellous colouring, growing deeper and deeper, until the