s tame in the extreme. The
'cliff' was so meagre and unimposing as to suggest the suspicion of
being only an artificial or semi-artificial erection; the shore had no
excitement about it, not even that of quicksands. It was the 'safest'
spot all along the coast; even the most suicidally disposed of small
boys could _scarcely_ come to mischief there. The tides went out and
came in with an almost bourgeois regularity and respectability; there
was no possibility of being 'surprised' by the waves; no lifeboat,
because within the memory of man no vessel of any description whatever
had been wrecked there; no lighthouse, no smugglers' caves of ancient
fame, no possibility of adventure of any kind--'no nothing,' Bessie
Harper was once heard to say, when she was very little, ''cept the sea
and the sky.'

A grand exception those, however, as we have said. And dull though it
was, there were some people who loved the little place as their home,
and were most ready to be happy in it.

It had some few distinct advantages. It was _very_ healthy, and for
these days very cheap. There was a good church, venerable and well cared
for; the few, very few residents were all estimable and some
interesting. Such as it was, take it all in all, it had seemed a very
haven of refuge to Captain Harper and his wife when, some eight or ten
years ago, they had pitched their tent there, after the last hopes of
recovering any of Mrs Harper's lost money--hopes which for long had
every now and then buoyed them up only to prove again delusive--had
finally deserted them.

'At anyrate,' the wife, with her irrepressibly sanguine nature, had
said, 'we have the comfort of now knowing the worst. And Colin and
Bertram are started. _What_ a good thing the boys were the eldest! There
is only Fitz to think about, and we'll manage him somehow. For _of
course_ the three girls will turn out well. Look at Camilla already.'

Fitz was then about five--the youngest son, the youngest of the family
excepting delicate little Margaret. He _was_ 'managed,' and not badly,
though a public school was an impossibility; his destination proved to
be the navy, and thither at the proper age he made his way in orthodox
fashion. The girls, helped by their mother, and by their father too, did
their best, and it was far from a bad best. They were naturally
intelligent; intensely anxious to seize all opportunities of learning,
so that a stray chance of half a dozen lessons in music or Fre