and
would not have dared to embrace her spontaneously, or make any other
demonstration of affection; but she was loyally devoted to her all the
same, and would gladly have stabbed Sophia Keene, and have done battle
with the whole of the rest of the family on her mother's behalf had
occasion offered.

She was curled up among the fuchsias on the window-seat of the
sitting-room one day, unobserved by her parents, who entered the room
together after she had settled herself there, and began to discuss the
Keenes.

"You did not tell me, Henry, you spent all your time with them before
we came," Mrs. Caldwell said reproachfully.

"Why should I?" he answered, with a jaunty affectation of ease.

"It is not why you should," his wife said with studied gentleness,
"but why you should not. It seems so strange, making a mystery of it."

"I described old Keene to you--the old buffalo!" he replied; "and I'll
describe the girls now if you like. Mary is a gawk, Sophia is as
yellow as a duck's foot, and Lenore is half-witted."

The Keenes were ignorant, idle, good-tempered young women, and kind to
the children, whom they often took to bathe with them. They were
seldom able to go into the sea itself, for it was a wild, tempestuous
coast; but there were lovely clear pools on the rocky shore, natural
stone baths left full of water when the tide went out, sheltered from
the wind by tall, dark, precipitous cliffs, and warmed by the sun; and
there they used to dabble by the hour together. Anne went with them,
and it was a pretty sight, the four young women in white chemises that
clung to them when wet, and the three lovely children--little white
nudities with bright brown hair--scampering over the rocks, splashing
each other in the pools, or lying about on warm sunny slabs, resting
and chattering. One day Beth found some queer things in a pool, and
Sophia told her they were barnacles.

"They stick to the bottom of a ship," she said, "and grow heavier and
heavier till at last the ship can make no more way, and comes to a
standstill in a shining sea, where the water is as smooth as a mirror;
you would think it was a mirror, in fact, if it did not heave gently
up and down like your breast when you breathe; and every time it
heaves it flushes some colour, blue, or green, or pink, or purple. And
the barnacles swell and swell at the bottom of the ship, till at last
they burst in two with a loud report; and then the sailors rush to the
side of