reconcile her, on her death-bed, to the
common doom?

She sighed as she folded up Captain Bennydeck's letter and put it in her
bosom, to be read again. "If my lot had fallen among good people," she
thought, "perhaps I might have belonged to the Church which took care of
that poor girl."

Her mind was still pursuing its own sad course of inquiry; she was
wondering in what part of England Sandyseal might be; she was asking
herself if the Nuns at the old moated house ever opened their doors to
women, whose one claim on their common Christianity was the claim to be
pitied--when she heard Linley's footsteps approaching the door.

His tone was kind; his manner was gentle; his tender interest in her
seemed to have revived. Her long absence had alarmed him; he feared she
might be ill. "I was only thinking," she said. He smiled, and sat down
by her, and asked if she had been thinking of the place that they should
go to when they left London.

Chapter XXXIII. Mrs. Romsey.

The one hotel in Sandyseal was full, from the topmost story to the
ground floor; and by far the larger half of the landlord's guests were
invalids sent to him by the doctors.

To persons of excitable temperament, in search of amusement, the place
offered no attractions. Situated at the innermost end of a dull little
bay, Sandyseal--so far as any view of the shipping in the Channel was
concerned--might have been built on a remote island in the Pacific
Ocean. Vessels of any importance kept well out of the way of treacherous
shoals and currents lurking at the entrance of the bay. The anchorage
ground was good; but the depth of water was suited to small vessels
only--to shabby old fishing-smacks which seldom paid their expenses, and
to dirty little coasters carrying coals and potatoes. At the back of the
hotel, two slovenly rows of cottages took their crooked course inland.
Sailing masters of yachts, off duty, sat and yawned at the windows; lazy
fishermen looked wearily at the weather over their garden gates; and
superfluous coastguards gathered together in a wooden observatory, and
leveled useless telescopes at an empty sea. The flat open country, with
its few dwarf trees and its mangy hedges, lay prostrate under the sky
in all the desolation of solitary space, and left the famous restorative
air free to build up dilapidated nerves, without an object to hinder its
passage at any point of the compass. The lonely drab-colored road that
led to the near