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Marguerite reverently touched a fold of the nun’s robe. “I am sorry,” she whispered very mournfully; “I am sorry!”

For a moment Laurence had been watching the picture made by the “Gamin” in this unusually contrite mood, looking, in fact, quite like a little saint in the discreet sun-shower beneath the trees that dappled her slim black gown and formed a bright nimbus around her lovely lowered head. Twice she opened her lips to speak, but refrained. Then, courtesying deeply to the nun, she walked demurely indoors, where, however, as soon as she found herself alone, she raced at top speed up the stairs, thinking, as she went: “Better so. Outbursts are—are—vulgar, as Madame Marie-Antoinette has so sapiently remarked, and our poor ‘Gamin’ is still so very impulsive—so impossible to convince that I’d sooner not try it!”

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Where first the wave, in long unrest

Rolled from the glamour of the West,

Breaks with the voice of Fate along

The shores of Legend and of Song.

The sea was beating into unbroken foam at the foot of the towering cliff—an uninterrupted front of granite, quite unscalable except at narrow clefts four and five miles apart, which nobody would attempt except at low water, when a precarious path of shingle is laid bare between that grim rampart and the lip of the tide. A summer storm had raged for two days and nights along this terrible coast, and now, although the leadenness of the sky was thinning here and there to patches of faded turquoise, the waves, still savagely churned by the wind, were piling beds of semi-solid spume far above the ragged margin of the inner Bay of Plenhöel.