sh
moment. "It flies too high for me. It says, under 'Cards,' that no
lady who respects herself would talk about the 'Jack of Spades'; but
when I played _Fives and Sevens_ at the last harvest supper but one, and
started to call him a Knave, they all made fun of me till I gave it up."
She opined, nevertheless, that Tilda would find some good reading in it
here and there; and Tilda, sharp as a needle, guessed what Miss Chrissy
meant--that a study of it would discourage an aspirant to good society
from smiling up at it between her ankles. She forgave the divined
intention of the gift, for the gift itself was precisely what her soul
had been craving. She borrowed it for the day with affected
nonchalance--Tilda never gave herself away--and hugged the volume in her
pocket as she and Arthur Miles and 'Dolph explored the coombe's downward
windings to the sea.

A moor stream ran down the coombe, dodging and twisting between the
overlaps of the hills, and ended in a fairy waterfall, over which it
sprang some thirty feet to alight on a beach of clean-washed boulders.
Close beside the edge of the fall stood a mud-walled cottage, untenanted
and roofless, relic of a time when Farmer Tossell's father had
adventured two or three hundred pounds in the fishery, and kept a man
here with two grown sons to look after his nets. Nettles crowded the
doorway, and even sprouted from crevices of the empty window sockets.
Nettles almost breast-high carpeted the kitchen floor to the
hearthstone. Nettles, in fact--whole regiments of nettles--had taken
possession and defended it. But Tilda, with the book in her pocket,
decided that here was the very spot for her--a real house in which to
practise the manners and deportment of a real lady, and she resolved to
borrow or steal a hook after dinner and clear the nettles away.
Farmer Tossell had promised the children that on the morrow he would
(as he put it) ride them over to Miss Sally's house at Culvercoombe, to
pay a call on that great gentlewoman; to-morrow being Sunday and his day
of leisure. But to-day he was busy with the sheep, and the children had
a long morning and afternoon to fill up as best they might.

Arthur Miles did not share Tilda's rapture over the ruined cottage, and
for a very good reason. He was battling with a cruel disappointment.
All the way down the coombe he had been on the look-out for his Island,
at every new twist and bend hoping for sight of it; and behold, when
t