y living there. The phantom of Avice, now grown to
be warm flesh and blood, held his mind afar. He thought of nothing
but the isle, and Avice the Second dwelling therein--inhaling its salt
breath, stroked by its singing rains and by the haunted atmosphere of
Roman Venus about and around the site of her perished temple there. The
very defects in the country girl became charms as viewed from town.

Nothing now pleased him so much as to spend that portion of the
afternoon which he devoted to out-door exercise, in haunting the
purlieus of the wharves along the Thames, where the stone of his native
rock was unshipped from the coasting-craft that had brought it thither.
He would pass inside the great gates of these landing-places on the
right or left bank, contemplate the white cubes and oblongs, imbibe
their associations, call up the genius loci whence they came, and almost
forget that he was in London.

One afternoon he was walking away from the mud-splashed entrance to one
of the wharves, when his attention was drawn to a female form on the
opposite side of the way, going towards the spot he had just left. She
was somewhat small, slight, and graceful; her attire alone would
have been enough to attract him, being simple and countrified
to picturesqueness; but he was more than attracted by her strong
resemblance to Avice Caro the younger--Ann Avice, as she had said she
was called.

Before she had receded a hundred yards he felt certain that it was Avice
indeed; and his unifying mood of the afternoon was now so intense that
the lost and the found Avice seemed essentially the same person. Their
external likeness to each other--probably owing to the cousinship
between the elder and her husband--went far to nourish the fantasy. He
hastily turned, and rediscovered the girl among the pedestrians. She
kept on her way to the wharf, where, looking inquiringly around her for
a few seconds, with the manner of one unaccustomed to the locality, she
opened the gate and disappeared.

Pierston also went up to the gate and entered. She had crossed to the
landing-place, beyond which a lumpy craft lay moored. Drawing nearer,
he discovered her to be engaged in conversation with the skipper and an
elderly woman--both come straight from the oolitic isle, as was apparent
in a moment from their accent. Pierston felt no hesitation in making
himself known as a native, the ruptured engagement between Avice's
mother and himself twenty years before