e professional writer cannot but adorn and embroider,
even to the detriment of his material--is, I am well aware, only an
aggravation of my offence, for the facts of life are the impossibilities
of fiction. A truer artist would have left this story alone, or at most
have kept it for the irritation of his private circle. My lower instinct
is to make use of it. A very old man told me the tale. He was landlord
of the Cromlech Arms, the only inn of a small, rock-sheltered village on
the north-east coast of Cornwall, and had been so for nine and forty
years. It is called the Cromlech Hotel now, and is under new management,
and during the season some four coach-loads of tourists sit down each day
to _table d'hote_ lunch in the low-ceilinged parlour. But I am speaking
of years ago, when the place was a mere fishing harbour, undiscovered by
the guide books.

The old landlord talked, and I hearkened the while we both sat drinking
thin ale from earthenware mugs, late one summer's evening, on the bench
that runs along the wall just beneath the latticed windows. And during
the many pauses, when the old landlord stopped to puff his pipe in
silence, and lay in a new stock of breath, there came to us the murmuring
voices of the Atlantic; and often, mingled with the pompous roar of the
big breakers farther out, we would hear the rippling laugh of some small
wave that, maybe, had crept in to listen to the tale the landlord told.

The mistake that Charles Seabohn, Junior partner of the firm of Seabohn &
Son, civil engineers of London and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Mivanway
Evans, youngest daughter of the Rev. Thomas Evans, Pastor of the
Presbyterian Church at Bristol, made originally, was marrying too young.
Charles Seabohn could hardly have been twenty years of age, and Mivanway
could have been little more than seventeen, when they first met upon the
cliffs, two miles beyond the Cromlech Arms. Young Charles Seabohn,
coming across the village in the course of a walking tour, had decided to
spend a day or two exploring the picturesque coast, and Mivanway's father
had hired that year a neighbouring farmhouse wherein to spend his summer
vacation.

Early one morning--for at twenty one is virtuous, and takes exercise
before breakfast--as young Charles Seabohn lay upon the cliffs, watching
the white waters coming and going upon the black rocks below, he became
aware of a form rising from the waves. The figure was too far off for
him t