th a snub.

Miss Cornelia personated the comedy that ever peeps around the corner
at the tragedy of life. Anne, whose nerves had been rather strained,
laughed hysterically, and even Owen smiled. Certainly, sentiment and
passion had a way of shrinking out of sight in Miss Cornelia's
presence. And yet to Anne nothing seemed quite as hopeless and dark
and painful as it had seemed a few moments before. But sleep was far
from her eyes that night.

CHAPTER 27

ON THE SAND BAR

Owen Ford left Four Winds the next morning. In the evening Anne went
over to see Leslie, but found nobody. The house was locked and there
was no light in any window. It looked like a home left soulless.
Leslie did not run over on the following day--which Anne thought a bad
sign.

Gilbert having occasion to go in the evening to the fishing cove, Anne
drove with him to the Point, intending to stay awhile with Captain Jim.
But the great light, cutting its swathes through the fog of the autumn
evening, was in care of Alec Boyd and Captain Jim was away.

"What will you do?" asked Gilbert. "Come with me?"

"I don't want to go to the cove--but I'll go over the channel with you,
and roam about on the sand shore till you come back. The rock shore is
too slippery and grim tonight."

Alone on the sands of the bar Anne gave herself up to the eerie charm
of the night. It was warm for September, and the late afternoon had
been very foggy; but a full moon had in part lessened the fog and
transformed the harbor and the gulf and the surrounding shores into a
strange, fantastic, unreal world of pale silver mist, through which
everything loomed phantom-like. Captain Josiah Crawford's black
schooner sailing down the channel, laden with potatoes for Bluenose
ports, was a spectral ship bound for a far uncharted land, ever
receding, never to be reached. The calls of unseen gulls overhead were
the cries of the souls of doomed seamen. The little curls of foam that
blew across the sand were elfin things stealing up from the sea-caves.
The big, round-shouldered sand-dunes were the sleeping giants of some
old northern tale. The lights that glimmered palely across the harbor
were the delusive beacons on some coast of fairyland. Anne pleased
herself with a hundred fancies as she wandered through the mist. It
was delightful--romantic--mysterious to be roaming here alone on this
enchanted shore.

But was she alone? Something loomed in the mist before h