se it will be."

She was looking into the cellar, not towards the edge of the bank.

"With a decent strong tide," she remarked, "you can hear the waves in
this cave."

Whereupon she walked slowly past him back toward her house. Caius took
the precaution to step after her round the end of the byre, just to see
that her husband was not lying in wait for her there. There was no one
to be seen but the children at a distance, still swinging on the gate,
and a labourer who was driving some cows from the field.

Caius slipped down on to the red shore, and found himself in a wide
semicircular bay, near the point which ended it on this side. He crept
round the bay inwards for half a mile, till he came to the mouth of the
creek to which he was bound. All the long spring evening he sat angling
for the speckled sea-trout, until the dusk fell and the blue water
turned gray, and he could no longer see the ruddy colour of the rock on
which he sat. All the long spring evening the trout rose to his fly one
by one, and were landed in his basket easily enough, and soft-throated
frogs piped to him from ponds in the fields behind, and the smell of
budding verdure from the land mingled with the breeze from the sea. But
Caius was not happy; he was brooding over the misery suggested by what
he had just seen, breathing his mind after its unusual rush of emotion,
and indulging its indignant melancholy. It did not occur to him to
wonder much why the object of his pity had made that quick errand to the
cellar in the chine, or why she had taken interest in the height of the
tide. He supposed her to be inwardly distracted by her misery. She had
the reputation of being a strange woman.

CHAPTER III.

LOST IN THE SEA.

There was no moon that night. When the darkness began to gather swiftly,
Caius swung his basket of fish and his tackle over his shoulder and
tramped homeward. His preference was to go round by the road and avoid
the Day farm; then he thought it might be his duty to go that way,
because it might chance that the woman needed protection as he passed.
It is much easier to give such protection in intention than in deed;
but, as it happened, the deed was not required. The farmstead was
perfectly still as he went by it again.

He went on half a mile, passing only such friendly persons as it was
natural he should meet on the public road. They were few. Caius walked
listening to the sea lapping below the low cliff near which the