memory of the little girl, and idealized her
loveliness. The first warm weather of the year, the exquisite but
fugitive beauties of the spring, lent emphasis to his mood, and because
his home was not a soil congenial to the growth of any but the more
ordinary sentiments, he began at this time to seek in natural solitudes
a more fitting environment for his musings. More than once, in the days
that immediately followed, he sought by daylight the spot where, in the
darkness, he had seen the child thrown into the sea. It soon occurred to
him to make an epitaph for her, and carve it in the cliff over which she
was thrown. In the noon-day hours in which his father rested, he worked
at this task, and grew to feel at home in the place and its
surroundings.

The earth in this place, as in others, showed red, the colour of red
jasper, wherever its face was not covered by green grass or blue water.
Just here, where the mother had sought out a precipice under which the
tide lay deep, there was a natural water-wall of red sandstone, rubbed
and corrugated by the waves. This wall of rock extended but a little
way, and ended in a sharp jutting point.

The little island that stood out toward the open sea had sands of red
gold; level it was and covered with green bushes, its sandy beach
surrounding it like a ring.

On the other side of the jutting point a bluff of red clay and crumbling
rock continued round a wide bay. Where the rim of the blue water lay
thin on this beach there showed a purple band, shading upward into the
dark jasper red of damp earth in the lower cliff. The upper part of the
cliff was very dry, and the earth was pink, a bright earthen pink. This
ribbon of shaded reds lay all along the shore. The land above it was
level and green.

At the other horn of the bay a small town stood; its white houses, seen
through the trembling lens of evaporating water, glistened with almost
pearly brightness between the blue spaces of sky and water. All the
scene was drenched in sunlight in those spring days.

The town, Montrose by name, was fifteen miles away, counting miles by
the shore. The place where Caius was busy was unfrequented, for the land
near was not fertile, and a wooded tract intervened between it and the
better farms of the neighbourhood. The home of the lost child and one
other poor dwelling were the nearest houses, but they were not very
near.

Caius did not attempt to carve his inscription on the mutable sandsto