d or foam bubbles or of blistered light, to do; and
every one, having done it, died and subsided into its successor.

"A trifle sentimental, are we?" cried a lively voice behind me, and
the waves of my soft reflections fell, and instead of them stood Sir
Montague Hockin, with a hideous parasol.

I never received him with worse grace, often as I had repulsed him; but
he was one of those people who think that women are all whims and ways.

"I grieve to intrude upon large ideas," he said, as I rose and looked at
him, "but I act under positive orders now. A lady knows what is best
for a lady. Mrs. Hockin has been looking from the window, and she thinks
that you ought not to be sitting in the sun like this. There has been
a case of sun-stroke at Southbourne--a young lady meditating under the
cliff--and she begs you to accept this palm leaf."

I thought of the many miles I had wandered under the fierce Californian
sun; but I would not speak to him of that. "Thank you," I said; "it was
very kind of her to think of it, and of you to do it. But will it be
safe for you to go back without it?"

"Oh, why should I do so?" he answered, with a tone of mock pathos which
provoked me always, though I never could believe it to be meant in
ridicule of me, for that would have been too low a thing; and, besides,
I never spoke so. "Could you bear to see me slain by the shafts of the
sun? Miss Castlewood, this parasol is amply large for both of us."

I would not answer him in his own vein, because I never liked his vein
at all; though I was not so entirely possessed as to want every body to
be like myself.

"Thank you; I mean to stay here," I said; "you may either leave the
parasol or take it, whichever will be less troublesome. At any rate, I
shall not use it."

A gentleman, according to my ideas, would have bowed and gone upon his
way; but Sir Montague Hockin would have no rebuff. He seemed to look
upon me as a child, such as average English girls, fresh from little
schools, would be. Nothing more annoyed me, after all my thoughts and
dream of some power in myself, than this.

"Perhaps I might tell you a thing or two," he said, while I kept gazing
at some fishing-boats, and sat down again, as a sign for him to go--"a
little thing or two of which you have no idea, even in your most lonely
musings, which might have a very deep interest for you. Do you think
that I came to this hole to see the sea? Or that fussy old muff of a
Major's