breathe causing a tightness in her throat.

"The glory has departed, very much departed, so I had best make haste to
depart also," she told herself; but told herself gallantly, smiling at
her own strange plight in a spirit of adventure, discovering in it the
excitement of novel experience.

She picked her way over the shingle and black sea litter of high-water
mark, and started to run along the narrow strip between it and the
advancing tide. To run would circulate her blood, warm her through and
keep her gallant humour up; still she had to own she found this heavy
going, for her feet were numb and the sand seemed to pluck at and weigh
them down. Her run slackened to a walk. Then she ventured a yard or two
out into the shallow water, hoping there to meet with firmer foothold;
but here it proved altogether too cold. She had the misfortune, moreover,
to tread on the top end of a razor shell, buried upright, which cut the
skin making her limp from pain and sharpness of smarting. So perforce,
she took to the deep blown sand again above high-water mark, and ploughed
along slowly enough in growing weariness and discomfort.

Never, surely, was any half-mile so long as this between the place of her
farewell to the mottled stilt-legged birds and subsequent sleeping, and
the place where she left her hat and shoes and stockings! In the dimness
and chill of the falling mist, it seemed to lengthen and lengthen to an
altogether incomprehensible extent. Time and again she stopped and
scanned the ground immediately before her, certain she should see there
those so lightly discarded and now so earnestly desired items of
clothing. Once in possession of them she would simply scurry home. For
visions of warm, dry pretty garments, of Mary's, comely ministering
presence, of tea, of lamp-light and--yes, she would allow herself that
culminating luxury--of a fine log fire in the long sitting-room,
presented themselves to her imagination in most alluring sequence--the
spirit of adventure, meanwhile, as must be owned, beginning to sing small
and hang a diminished head.

But on a sudden, raising her eyes from their persistent search, Damaris
realized she must have missed and already passed the spot. For she was
close upon the tract of sand-hills--a picture of desolation in the sullen
murk, the winding hollows between their pale formless elevations bearing
a harsh growth of neutral tinted sword-like grasses.

She had come too far by a quarter o