f artificial fruit, she screwed up the
"banner-screen" that projected from the mantelpiece, she straightened
out the bead mat on which the stereoscope stood, and at last surveyed
the room with an expression of complete satisfaction on her kindly face.

An hour later Westray was asleep, and Miss Joliffe was saying her
prayers. She added a special thanksgiving for the providential
direction to her house of so suitable and gentlemanly a lodger, and a
special request that he might be happy whilst he should be under her
roof. But her devotions were disturbed by the sound of Mr Sharnall's
piano.

"He plays most beautifully," she said to her niece, as she put out the
candle; "but I wish he would not play so late. I am afraid I have not
thought so earnestly as I should at my prayers."

Anastasia Joliffe said nothing. She was grieved because the organist
was thumping out old waltzes, and she knew by his playing that he had
been drinking.

CHAPTER THREE.

The Hand of God stood on the highest point in all the borough, and Mr
Westray's apartments were in the third story. From the window of his
sitting-room he could look out over the houses on to Cullerne Flat, the
great tract of salt-meadows that separated the town from the sea. In
the foreground was a broad expanse of red-tiled roofs; in the middle
distance Saint Sepulchre's Church, with its tower and soaring ridges,
stood out so enormous that it seemed as if every house in the place
could have been packed within its walls; in the background was the blue
sea.

In summer the purple haze hangs over the mouth of the estuary, and
through the shimmer of the heat off the marsh, can be seen the silver
windings of the Cull as it makes its way out to sea, and snow-white
flocks of geese, and here and there the gleaming sail of a
pleasure-boat. But in autumn, as Westray saw it for the first time, the
rank grass is of a deeper green, and the face of the salt-meadows is
seamed with irregular clay-brown channels, which at high-tide show out
like crows'-feet on an ancient countenance, but at the ebb dwindle to
little gullies with greasy-looking banks and a dribble of iridescent
water in the bottom. It is in the autumn that the moles heap up
meanders of miniature barrows, built of the softest brown loam; and in
the turbaries the turf-cutters pile larger and darker stacks of peat.

Once upon a time there was another feature in the view, for there could
have been seen the masts