n' the people as kept it gone
away--no one couldn't stay there arter that. Ay, ay!" and Twitt sighed
profoundly--"Poor wild ne'er-do-weel Tom! He lies deep down enough now
with the waves flowin' over 'im an' 'is little 'Kiddie' clasped tight in
'is arms. For they never separated 'em,--death 'ad locked 'em up too
fast together for that. An' they're sleepin' peaceful,--an' there
they'll sleep till--till 'the sea gives up its dead.'"

Helmsley could not speak,--he was too deeply moved. The sound of the
in-coming tide grew fuller and more sonorous, and Twitt presently turned
to look critically at the heaving waters.

"There's a cry in the sea to-day,"--he said,--"M'appen it'll be rough
to-night."

They were silent again, till presently Helmsley roused himself from the
brief melancholy abstraction into which he had been plunged by the story
of Tom o' the Gleam's funeral.

"I think I'll go down on the shore for a bit,"--he said; "I like to get
as close to the waves as I can when they're rolling in."

"Well, don't get too close,"--said Twitt, kindly--"We'll be havin' ye
washed away if ye don't take care! There's onny an hour to tea-time, an'
Mary Deane's a punctooal 'ooman!"

"I shall not keep her waiting--never fear!" and Helmsley smiled as he
said good-day, and jogged slowly along his favourite accustomed path to
the beach. The way though rough, was not very steep, and it was becoming
quite easy and familiar to him. He soon found himself on the firm brown
sand sprinkled with a fringe of seaweed and shells, and further adorned
in various places with great rough boulders, picturesquely set up on
end, like the naturally hewn memorials of great heroes passed away.
Here, the ground being level, he could walk more quickly and with
greater comfort than in the one little precipitous street of Weircombe,
and he paced up and down, looking at the rising and falling hollows of
the sea with wistful eyes that in their growing age and dimness had an
intensely pathetic expression,--the expression one sometimes sees in the
eyes of a dog who knows that its master is leaving it for an indefinite
period.

"What a strange chaos of brain must be that of the suicide!" he
thought--"Who, that can breathe the fresh air and watch the lights and
shadows in the sky and on the waves, would really wish to leave the
world, unless the mind had completely lost its balance! We have never
seen anything more beautiful than this planet upon which we are