t on her arm. This
disclosed her five long brown cable-like curls that hung down her
shoulders, reaching below her waist in some forgotten fashion of
girlhood. They were Cissy's peculiar adornment, remarkable for their
length, thickness, and the extraordinary youthfulness imparted to a
figure otherwise precociously matured. In some wavering doubt of her
actual years and privileges, Brother Seabright offered to carry
her cloak for her, but she declined it with a rustic and youthful
pertinacity that seemed to settle the question. In fact, Cissy was
as much embarrassed as she was flattered by the company of this
distinguished stranger. However, it would be known to all West Woodland
that he had walked home with her, while nobody but herself would know
that they had scarcely exchanged a word. She noticed how he lounged on
with a heavy, rolling gait, sometimes a little before or behind her as
the path narrowed. At such times when they accidentally came in contact
in passing, she felt a half uneasy, physical consciousness of him, which
she referred to his size, the scars on his face, or some latent hardness
of expression, but was relieved to see that he had not observed it.
Yet this was the man that made grown women cry; she thought of old
Mrs. Jackson fervently grasping the plodding ankles before her, and
a hysteric desire to laugh, with the fear that he might see it on her
face, overcame her. Then she wondered if he was going to walk all the
way home without speaking, yet she knew she would be more embarrassed if
he began to talk to her.

Suddenly he stopped, and she bumped up against him.

"Oh, excuse me!" she stammered hurriedly.

"Eh?" He evidently had not noticed the collision. "Did you speak?"

"No!--that is--it wasn't anything," returned the girl, coloring.

But he had quite forgotten her, and was looking intently before him.
They had come to a break in the fringe of woodland, and upon a sudden
view of the ocean. At this point the low line of coast-range which
sheltered the valley of West Woodlands was abruptly cloven by a gorge
that crumbled and fell away seaward to the shore of Horse Shoe Bay.
On its northern trend stretched the settlement of Horse Shoe to the
promontory of Whale Mouth Point, with its outlying reef of rocks curved
inwards like the vast submerged jaw of some marine monster, through
whose blunt, tooth-like projections the ship-long swell of the Pacific
streamed and fell. On the southern shore the