ess's foolish lisp had
called up a vision of the little fire-lit drawing-room and the sound of
the carriage-wheels returning down the deserted street. He thought of
a story he had read, of some peasant children in Tuscany lighting a
bunch of straw in a wayside cavern, and revealing old silent images in
their painted tomb ...

The way to the shore descended from the bank on which the house was
perched to a walk above the water planted with weeping willows.
Through their veil Archer caught the glint of the Lime Rock, with its
white-washed turret and the tiny house in which the heroic light-house
keeper, Ida Lewis, was living her last venerable years. Beyond it lay
the flat reaches and ugly government chimneys of Goat Island, the bay
spreading northward in a shimmer of gold to Prudence Island with its
low growth of oaks, and the shores of Conanicut faint in the sunset
haze.

From the willow walk projected a slight wooden pier ending in a sort of
pagoda-like summer-house; and in the pagoda a lady stood, leaning
against the rail, her back to the shore. Archer stopped at the sight
as if he had waked from sleep. That vision of the past was a dream,
and the reality was what awaited him in the house on the bank overhead:
was Mrs. Welland's pony-carriage circling around and around the oval at
the door, was May sitting under the shameless Olympians and glowing
with secret hopes, was the Welland villa at the far end of Bellevue
Avenue, and Mr. Welland, already dressed for dinner, and pacing the
drawing-room floor, watch in hand, with dyspeptic impatience--for it
was one of the houses in which one always knew exactly what is
happening at a given hour.

"What am I? A son-in-law--" Archer thought.

The figure at the end of the pier had not moved. For a long moment the
young man stood half way down the bank, gazing at the bay furrowed with
the coming and going of sailboats, yacht-launches, fishing-craft and
the trailing black coal-barges hauled by noisy tugs. The lady in the
summer-house seemed to be held by the same sight. Beyond the grey
bastions of Fort Adams a long-drawn sunset was splintering up into a
thousand fires, and the radiance caught the sail of a catboat as it
beat out through the channel between the Lime Rock and the shore.
Archer, as he watched, remembered the scene in the Shaughraun, and
Montague lifting Ada Dyas's ribbon to his lips without her knowing that
he was in the room.

"She doesn't know--she ha