n; and then looking up, as if to excuse himself,--

"You have such pretty feet, mother!"

Instantly, with a woman's instinct, she had hidden them. She had been a
beauty once, as I said; and though her hair was gray, and her roses had
faded long ago, she was beautiful still, in all eyes which saw deeper
than the mere outward red and white.

"Your dear father used to say so thirty years ago."

"And I say so still: you always were beautiful; you are beautiful now."

"What is that to you, silly boy? Will you play the lover with an old
mother? Go and take your walk, and think of younger ladies, if you can
find any worthy of you."

And so the son went forth, and the mother returned to her prayers.

He walked down to the pebble ridge, where the surges of the bay have
defeated their own fury, by rolling up in the course of ages a rampart
of gray boulder-stones, some two miles long, as cunningly curved, and
smoothed, and fitted, as if the work had been done by human hands, which
protects from the high tides of spring and autumn a fertile sheet of
smooth, alluvial turf. Sniffing the keen salt air like a young sea-dog,
he stripped and plunged into the breakers, and dived, and rolled, and
tossed about the foam with stalwart arms, till he heard himself hailed
from off the shore, and looking up, saw standing on the top of the
rampart the tall figure of his cousin Eustace.

Amyas was half-disappointed at his coming; for, love-lorn rascal, he had
been dreaming all the way thither of Rose Salterne, and had no wish
for a companion who would prevent his dreaming of her all the way back.
Nevertheless, not having seen Eustace for three years, it was but civil
to scramble out and dress, while his cousin walked up and down upon the
turf inside.

Eustace Leigh was the son of a younger brother of Leigh of Burrough, who
had more or less cut himself off from his family, and indeed from his
countrymen, by remaining a Papist. True, though born a Papist, he had
not always been one; for, like many of the gentry, he had become a
Protestant under Edward the Sixth, and then a Papist again under Mary.
But, to his honor be it said, at that point he had stopped, having
too much honesty to turn Protestant a second time, as hundreds did, at
Elizabeth's accession. So a Papist he remained, living out of the way
of the world in a great, rambling, dark house, still called "Chapel,"
on the Atlantic cliffs, in Moorwinstow parish, not far from Sir Richard