ad of her own generation; and,
as the growing darkness obscured him more and more, he adopted her
assumption of his age with increasing boldness of tone.

The flippant, harmless freedom of the watering-place Miss, which Avice
had plainly acquired during her sojourn at the Sandbourne school, helped
Pierston greatly in this role of jeune premier which he was not unready
to play. Not a word did he say about being a native of the island;
still more carefully did he conceal the fact of his having courted her
grandmother, and engaged himself to marry that attractive lady.

He found that she had come out upon the rocks through the same little
private door from the lawn of the modern castle which had frequently
afforded him egress to the same spot in years long past. Pierston
accompanied her across the grounds almost to the entrance of the
mansion--the place being now far better kept and planted than when he
had rented it as a lonely tenant; almost, indeed, restored to the order
and neatness which had characterized it when he was a boy.

Like her granny she was too inexperienced to be reserved, and during
this little climb, leaning upon his arm, there was time for a great deal
of confidence. When he had bidden her farewell, and she had entered,
leaving him in the dark, a rush of sadness through Pierston's soul swept
down all the temporary pleasure he had found in the charming girl's
company. Had Mephistopheles sprung from the ground there and then with
an offer to Jocelyn of restoration to youth on the usual terms of his
firm, the sculptor might have consented to sell a part of himself which
he felt less immediate need of than of a ruddy lip and cheek and an
unploughed brow.

But what could only have been treated as a folly by outsiders was almost
a sorrow for him. Why was he born with such a temperament? And this
concatenated interest could hardly have arisen, even with Pierston, but
for a conflux of circumstances only possible here. The three Avices, the
second something like the first, the third a glorification of the first,
at all events externally, were the outcome of the immemorial island
customs of intermarriage and of prenuptial union, under which conditions
the type of feature was almost uniform from parent to child through
generations: so that, till quite latterly, to have seen one native man
and woman was to have seen the whole population of that isolated rock,
so nearly cut off from the mainland. His own predispo