t the wasted figure of Dick
feebly ploughed its way back, and returned with the missing buskin.

"I may as well carry them in my hand like the market girls at Saumur,
for we have got to wade soon," said Miss Maria, sinking her own terrors
in the delightful contemplation of the horror in her parent's face, as
she pointed to a shining film of water slowly deepening in a narrow
swale in the sands between them and the cabin.

"It's the tide," said the elder gentleman. "If we intend to go on we
must hasten; permit me, my dear madam," and before she could reply he
had lifted the astounded matron in his arms, and made gallantly for the
ford. The gentle Maria cast an ominous eye on her brother, who, with
manifest reluctance, performed for her the same office. But that acute
young lady kept her eyes upon the preceding figure of the elder
gentleman, and seeing him suddenly and mysteriously disappear to his
armpits, unhesitatingly threw herself from her brother's protecting
arms,--an action which instantly precipitated him into the water,--and
paddled hastily to the opposite bank, where she eventually assisted in
pulling the elderly gentleman out of the hollow into which he had
fallen, and in rescuing her mother, who floated helplessly on the
surface, upheld by her skirts, like a gigantic and variegated
water-lily. Dick followed with a single gaiter. In another minute they
were safe on the opposite bank.

The elder lady gave way to tears; Maria laughed hysterically; Dick
mingled a bass oath with the now audible surf; the elder gentleman,
whose florid face the salt water had bleached, and whose dignity seemed
to have been washed away, accounted for both by saying he thought it
was a quicksand.

"It might have been," said a quiet voice behind them; "you should have
followed the sand dunes half a mile further to the estuary."

They turned instantly at the voice. It was that of the Man on the
Beach. They all rose to their feet and uttered together, save one, the
single exclamation, "James!" The elder gentleman said "Mr. North,"
and, with a slight resumption of his former dignity, buttoned his coat
over his damp shirt front.

There was a silence, in which the Man on the Beach looked gravely down
upon them. If they had intended to impress him by any suggestion of a
gay, brilliant, and sensuous world beyond in their own persons, they
had failed, and they knew it. Keenly alive as they had always been to
external prepossess