know it. Nursed my girl like an angel."

"Like what she is," said Tom.

"You said one true word once: that she was too good for us."

"For this world," said Tom; and fell into a great musing.

By those curt and surly utterances did Tardrew, in true British bulldog
fashion, express a repentance too deep for words; too deep for all
confessionals, penances, and emotions or acts of contrition; the
repentance not of the excitable and theatric southern, unstable as
water, even in his most violent remorse: but of the still, deep-hearted
northern, whose pride breaks slowly and silently, but breaks once for
all; who tells to God what he will never tell to man; and having told
it, is a new creature from that day forth for ever.

CHAPTER XIX.

BEDDGELERT.

The pleasant summer voyage is over. The Waterwitch is lounging off Port
Madoc, waiting for her crew. The said crow are busy on shore drinking
the ladies' healths, with a couple of sovereigns which Valencia has
given them, in her sister's name and her own. The ladies, under the care
of Elsley, and the far more practical care of Mr. Bowie, are rattling
along among children, maids, and boxes, over the sandy flats of the
Traeth Mawr, beside the long reaches of the lazy stream, with the blue
surges of the hills in front, and the silver sea behind. Soon they begin
to pass wooded knolls, islets of rock in the alluvial plain. The higher
peaks of Snowdon sink down behind the lower spurs in front; the plain
narrows; closes in, walled round with woodlands clinging to the steep
hill-sides; and, at last, they enter the narrow gorge of
Pont-Aberglaslyn,--pretty enough no doubt, but much over-praised; for there
are in Devon alone a dozen passes far grander, both for form and size.

Soon they emerge again on flat meadows, mountain-cradled; and the grave
of the mythic greyhound, and the fair old church, shrouded in tall
trees; and last, but not least, at the famous Leek Hotel, where ruleth
Mrs. Lewis, great and wise, over the four months' Babylon of guides,
cars, chambermaids, tourists, artists, and reading-parties, camp-stools,
telescopes, poetry-books, blue uglies, red petticoats, and parasols of
every hue.

There they settle down in the best rooms in the house, and all goes as
merrily as it can, while the horrors which they have left behind them
hang, like a black background, to all their thoughts. However, both
Scoutbush and Campbell send as cheerful reports as they honest