ll about it.

She forgot all about everything but the bare joy of life and the sea,
when she had donned the pretty scarlet suit, and crept out into the
surf,--at the proper medicinal hour, for the Doctor was very particular
with her,--when the warm brown waves broke over her face, the long
sea-weeds slipped through her fingers, the foam sprinkled her hair with
crystals, and the strong wind was up.

She was a swift swimmer, and as one watched from the shore, her lithe
scarlet shoulders seemed to glide like a trail of fire through the
lighted water; and when she sat in shallow foam with sunshine on her, or
flashed through the dark green pools among the rocks, or floated with
the incoming tide, her great bathing-hat dropping shadows on her wet
little happy face, and her laugh ringing out, it was a pretty sight.

But a prettier one than that, her husband thought, was to see her in her
boat at sunset; when sea and sky were aflame, when every flake of foam
was a rainbow, and the great chalk-cliffs were blood-red; when the wind
blew her net off, and in pretty petulance she pulled her hair down, and
it rippled all about her as she dipped into the blazing West.

Dr. Sharpe used to drive home by the beach, on a fair night, always,
that he might see it. Then Harrie would row swiftly in, and spring into
the low, broad buggy beside him, and they rode home together in the
fragrant dusk. Sometimes she used to chatter on these twilight drives;
but more often she crept up to him and shut her eyes, and was as still
as a sleepy bird. It was so pleasant to do nothing but be happy!

I believe that at this time Dr. Sharpe loved his wife as unselfishly as
he knew how. Harrie often wrote me that he was "very good." She was
sometimes a little troubled that he should "know so much more" than she,
and had fits of reading the newspapers and reviewing her French, and
studying cases of hydrophobia, or some other pleasant subject which had
a professional air. Her husband laughed at her for her pains, but
nevertheless he found her so much the more entertaining. Sometimes she
drove about with him on his calls, or amused herself by making jellies
in fancy moulds for his poor, or sat in his lap and discoursed like a
bobolink of croup and measles, pulling his whiskers the while with her
pink fingers.

All this, as I have said, was before the first baby came.

It is surprising what vague ideas young people in general, and young men
in particular, ha