."

"But you will be tired," Mrs. Harper said, reluctant still, yet loth to
resist Anne Valery.

"Tired? no! The salt breeze gives me strength--health. I hardly live
when I am not in sight of the Channel. Make haste, and let us go,
Agatha."

She seemed so eager, that no further objection was possible. So they
soon started--they three only, for Mary had occupation in the house, and
the Beauty was mightily averse to exercise and sea-air.

They climbed the steep road, overhung with trees, at whose roots grew
clusters of large primrose leaves, showing what a lovely walk it must
be in spring; then higher, till all this vegetation ceased, leaving
only the short grass cropped by the sheep, the purple thistles, and the
furze-bushes, yellow and cheerful all the year round. They then drove
along a high ridge for a mile or two, till they got quite out of sight
of Kingcombe Holm. Miss Valery talked gaily the whole way; and, as
though the sea-breeze truly gave her life, was the very first to propose
leaving the carriage and walking on, so as to catch the earliest glimpse
of the Channel.

"There!" she said, breathlessly, and quitting Mr. Harper's arm, crossed
over to his wife. "There, Agatha!"

It was such a view as in her life the young girl had never beheld. They
stood on a high ridge, on one side of which lay a wide champaign of
moorland, on the other a valley, bounded by a second ridge, and between
the two sloping greenly down, till it terminated in a little bay.
Parallel to the valley ran this grand hill-terrace--until it likewise
reached the coast, ending abruptly in precipitous gigantic cliffs,
against which the tides of centuries might have beat themselves in vain.
Beyond all, motionless in the noonday dazzle, and curving itself away
in a mist of brightness where the eye failed, was the great, wide,
immeasurable sea.

The three stood gazing, but no one spoke. Agatha trembled, less with
her former fear than with that awestruck sense of the infinite which is
always given by the sight of the ocean--that ocean which One "holdeth
in the hollow of his hand." Gradually this awe grew fainter, and she
was able to look round her, and count the white dots scattered here and
there on the dazzling sheet of waves.

"There go the ships," said Nathanael. "See what numbers of
them--numbers, yet how few they seem!--are moving up and down on this
highway of all nations. Look, Agatha, at that one, a mere speck, dipping
in the horizon.