Smoking his pipe, he watched the sun burn away the fog, which lifted enough to show that the house, a comfortable building of the native red stone, faced the shore from a beautiful hollow field which curved as wide and graceful as the long arc of pink sand-beach below. Headlands north and south were blotted out, but the base of the great red walls stretched along between the green, heaving water and the white, slow-rising mist. The voice of the sea, vague, widespread, and hushing; the heavy air, a tepid mingling of fog and sunshine; the sense of lonely heights obscured,—and this was the island where a young girl, radiantly alive, must wear out her years with a tippler who studied the crumbling of time!
When he returned to the house, the sunshine had already conquered; and in the hall father and daughter were awaiting him,—the former very white and evasive, the latter a little tired, and not beautiful as by candle-light, but brown-eyed, winning, a gracious young white-robed mistress of the house.
"Good-morning," she cried, with honest
