as the colour riven, and rays of light shot up,
crimson flashes of flame, which, while Beth held her breath, were fast
followed from the sea by the sun, that rose enwrapt in their
splendour, while the water below caught the fine flush, and heaved and
heaved like a breast expanding with delight into long deep sighs.

Beth cried aloud: "O Lord of Loveliness! how mighty are Thy
manifestations!"

Later in the day she climbed to the top of the hill where Charlotte
had kept her faithful watch for the dark-brown horse, and there,
beneath the firs, she sat looking out, with large eyes straining far
into the vague distance where Hector had been.

The ground was padded with pine-needles, briony berries shone in the
hedgerows below, and hips and haws and rowans also rioted in red.
Brambles were heavy with blue-black berries, and the bracken was
battered and brown on the steep hill-side. Down in the road a team of
four horses, dappled bays with black points and coats as glossy as
satin, drawing a waggon of wheat, curved their necks and tossed their
heads till the burnished brasses of their harness rang, and pacing
with pride, as if they rejoiced to carry the harvest home. On the top
of the wheat two women in coloured cotton frocks rested and sang--sang
quite blithely.

Beth watched the waggon out of sight, then rose, and turning, faced
the sea. As she descended the hill she left that dream behind her.
Hector, like Sammy and Arthur, passed to the background of her
recollections, where her lovers ceased from troubling, and the Secret
Service of Humanity, superseded, was no more a living interest.

Beth went also to the farther sands to visit the spot where she had
been surprised in the water by the girls, and had become the white
priestess of their bathing rites, and taught that girls had a strength
as great as the strength of boys, but different, if only they would do
things. Mere mental and physical strength were what Beth was thinking
of; she knew nothing of spiritual force, although she was using it
herself at the time, and doing with it what all the boys in the
diocese, taken together, could not have done. She had heard of works
of the Spirit, and that she should pray to be imbued with it; but that
she herself was pure spirit, only waiting to be released from her case
of clay, had never been hinted to her.

The next day she travelled with her mother from the north to the
south, and during the whole long journey there was