ing-place the attendant spirit of delight.

You could never have guessed how old they were. He, at thirty-five, had
preserved, by some miracle, his alert and slender adolescence. In his
brown, clean-shaven face, keen with pleasure, you saw the clear,
serious eyes and the adorable smile of seventeen. She, at thirty, had
kept the wide eyes and tender mouth of childhood. Her face had a child's
immortal, spiritual appeal.

They were charming with each other. You might have taken them for bride
and bridegroom, his absorption in her was so unimpaired. But their names
in the visitors' book stood as Mr. Robert Lucy and Miss Jane Lucy. They
were brother and sister. You gathered it from something absurdly alike
in their faces, something profound and racial and enduring.

For they combined it all, the youth, the abandonment, the innocence,
with an indomitable distinction.

They made their way with easy, unembarrassed movements, and seated
themselves at a table by an open window. They bent their brows together
over the menu. The head-waiter (who had flown at last to their high
summons) made them his peculiar care, and they turned to him with the
helplessness of children. He told them what things they would like,
what things (he seemed to say) would be good for them. And when he went
away with their order they looked at each other and laughed, softly and
instantaneously.

They had done the right thing. They both said it at the same moment,
smiling triumphantly into each other's face. Southbourne was exquisite
in young June, at the dawn of its season. And the Cliff Hotel promised
what they wanted, a gay seclusion, a refined publicity.

If you were grossly rich, you went to the big Hotel Metropole, opposite.
If you were a person of fastidious tastes and an attenuated income, you
felt the superior charm of the Cliff Hotel. The little house, the joy of
its proprietor, was hidden in the privacy of its own beautiful grounds,
having its back to the high road and its face to the open sea. They had
taken stock of it that morning, with its clean walls, white as the
Cliff it stood on; its bay windows, its long, green-roofed veranda,
looking south; its sharp, slated roofs and gables, all sheltered by the
folding Downs.

They did not know which of them had first suggested Southbourne.
Probably they had both thought of it at the same moment, as they were
thinking now. But it was she who had voted for the Cliff Hotel, in
preference to lodg