id to myself, as I sat down upon the boulder, 'At this very
moment she is here, she is in Raxton. In a certain little cottage
there is a certain little room.' And then I longed to leave the
sands, to go and stand in front of Wynne's cottage and dream there.
But that would be too foolish. 'I must get home,' I thought. 'The
night will pass somehow, and in the morning I shall, as sure as fate,
see her flitting about the sands she loves, and then what I have
sworn to say to her I will say, and what I have sworn to do I will
do, come what will.'

Then came the puzzling question, how was I to greet her when we met?
Was I to run up and kiss her, and hear her say, 'Oh, I'm so pleased!'
as she would sometimes say when I kissed her of yore? No: her
deportment in the morning forbade _that_. Or was I to raise my hat
and walk up to her saying, 'How do you do, Miss Wynne? I'm glad to
see you back, Miss Wynne,' for she was now neither child nor young
woman, she was a 'girl.' Perhaps I had better rush up to her in a
bluff, hearty way, and say: 'How do you do, Miss Winifred? Delighted
to see you back to Raxton.' Finally, I decided that circumstance must
guide me entirely, and I sat upon the boulder meditating.

After a while I saw, or thought I saw, in the far distance, close to
the waves, a moving figure among the patches of rocks and stones
(some black and some white) that break the continuity of the sand on
that shore at low water.

When the figure got nearer I perceived it to be a woman, a girl, who,
every now and then, was stooping as if to pick up something from the
pools of water left by the ebbing tide imprisoned amid the encircling
rocks. At first I watched the figure, wondering in a lazy and dreamy
way what girl could be out there so late.

But all at once I began to catch my breath and gasp The sea-smells
had become laden with a kind of paradisal perfume, ineffably sweet,
but difficult to breathe all of a sudden. My heart too--what was
amiss with that? And why did the muscles of my body seem to melt like
wax?' The lonely wanderer by the sea could be none other than
Winifred.

'It is she!' I said. 'There is no beach-woman or shore-prowling girl
who, without raising an arm to balance her body, without a totter or
a slip, could step in that way upon stones some of which are as
slippery as ice with gelatinous weed and slime, while others are as
sharp as razors. To walk like that the eye must be my darling's, that
is to say