he spray on your face, and
if you lie a-bed the tang of the air sweeping across the Atlantic will
get you out at the double; and the smell of the pines, and the hum of
the bees in summer, and the rush of the storm, and the crash of the
waves in winter, are of God's own fashioning.

What with shopping expeditions to that crime in brick and mortar called
Ilfracombe, visits here and visits there, croquet, bridge, and picnics,
the summer and early autumn months had not dragged unduly for Susan
Hetth.

But when the last visitor had gone, and the first real storm had broken
a window, then she had sunk like a lump of lead in a bucket of cold
water out of which she refused to be lifted.

Leonie was youth incarnate, causing even the courteous folk of Devon to
turn and stare as she swung past with a cheery greeting in a skirt and
hob-nailed boots ending at her knees.

For the first month, as one always does in Devon, she had walked
herself to the verge of scragginess, then had gradually put on weight,
as is the correct method. Her whistle could be heard in the woods and
fields, and on the beach from Lee to Hartland way; all the country folk
loved her, and scolded her for the risks she took in swimming, and she
seemingly had no care in the world.

But the great heat of summer, the shriek of the wind, and the scream of
the birds in autumn would bring a little pucker between her brows; the
storm would drive her spirits up to breaking point, the calm would
leave her eyes full of trouble; in the woods she would stop and turn to
listen, then frown and trudge along between the trees.

She was not at rest, for an unconfessed fear, a spook without name or
shape, was plucking at her will-power and her heart, a phantom of which
she would rather have died than have said one word.

So she stood twisting the blind cord and watching the rocks as they
gradually disappeared under the swirling waters.

Susan Hetth sat near the fire, which is oft-times necessary in the
spring at Lee, and tapped in irritation, and most irritatingly, with
her foot against the low fender.

She was worried.

She was not by birth or heredity a bad-tempered woman, merely one of
straw, who after the first two months of every quarter invariably found
herself in a corner which one injudicious move might render
uncomfortably tight.

Her financial situation, in fact, had become so critical, and the bank
manager's demeanour so unpropitious, that in the previous