ad worn nothing but white.

"It is the prettiest wear in the world," she had told Constance Grant;
"and when you're poor, it's the most impossible. But now I can have a
clean gown every day, and a clean conscience as well."

"I'm not sure about the conscience," Constance had answered with her
demure smile. "Think of the millions of poor people."

"Oh, bother!" Miss Rainham had laughed, not heartlessly, but happily.
"Thank Heaven, I've enough to be happy myself and make heaps of other
people happy too. And the first step is that no one's to know I'm rich,
so remember that we are two high-school teachers on a holiday."

"I loathe play-acting," Constance had said, but she had submitted, and
now she sat sketching, and Rosamund in her white gown watched the
seagulls and shrimpers from under the sea-wall of Lymchurch.

"And so your holiday's over in three days," she was saying to the young
man beside her; "it's been a good time, hasn't it?"

He did not answer; he was piling up the pebbles in a heap, and always at
a certain point the heap collapsed.

"What are you thinking of? Poems again?"

"I had a verse running in my head," he said apologetically; "it has
nothing to do with anything."

"Write it down at once," she said imperiously, and he obediently
scribbled in his notebook, while she took up the work of building the
stone heap--it grew higher under her light fingers.

"Read it!" she said, when the scribbling of the pencil stopped, and he
read:

"Now the vexed clouds, wind-driven, spread wings of white,
Long leaning wings across the sea and land;
The waves creep back, bequeathing to our sight
The treasure-house of their deserted sand;
And where the nearer waves curl white and low,
Knee-deep in swirling brine the slow-foot shrimpers go.

Pale breadth of sand where clamorous gulls confer
Marked with broad arrows by their planted feet,
White rippled pools where late deep waters were,
And ever the white waves marshalled in retreat,
And the grey wind in sole supremacy
O'er opal and amber cold of darkening sky and sea."

"Opal and amber cold," she repeated; "it's not like that now. It's
sapphire and gold and diamonds."

"Yes," he said; "but that was how it was last week----"

"Before I came----"

"Yes, before you came;" his tone put a new meaning into her words.

"I'm glad I brought good weather," she said cheerfully, and the little
stone heap rattled