Her husband, catching sight of Mrs Macmichel's face as she entered, followed her upstairs to her room. She was lying, dressed as she was, on her bed, with her face hidden. "My dear, what is the matter? What have you been doing with yourself?" he asked. She had been to the Rectory, to call on the Joneses, she told him. "Well?" "The _Doughty_ has gone down. All on board lost." "So I hear. Well?" "It was their son's ship." "Well?" "Freddy's." She sat up and laughed across the sob in her throat. "You stupid! I am crying because Freddy did not go down in the _Doughty_," she said. A NERVE CURE "_Well_, what a place!" Julia cried. I had come to it because of an urgent need of change, because it was by the sea, because it was cheap, because the advertisement had caught my eye at a moment when I was weary of vainly protesting that I wished to go nowhere except to bed. "TO LET, during the months of November and December, a six-roomed cottage; desirable; furnished; free of charge, with exception of caretaker's wage." A couple of letters from me, a couple in reply from the owner, who was going for the winter months abroad, and the affair was settled. Then my people who--although for ten years I have earned my own living, and helped to keep some of them who have not earned theirs, although I am five-and-thirty years of age and an absolutely dependable person--have never let me have my own way in any single matter, insisted that Julia should come with me. She is my youngest sister. I have not a word to say against her, of course; only I know that the things I am content to put up with are never good enough for Julia. "Well, _what_ a place!" Julia repeated; the shifting of the accent did not denote, I was sure, a more favourable view. It certainly was not a pretty cottage. It was also quite out of the town, in which we had believed it to be situated, standing at the extremity of an unfinished road which led halfway across the sandy waste lying between the town of Starbay and the village of Starcliff. "A garden, back and front," Miss Ferriman had promised me in one of her letters. There were the gardens, sure enough, but almost as unfinished as the road. "An airy situation and uninterrupted view of the sea," the description had continued, and was faithful as far as it went. The wind, which happened to be blowing a gale, without obstruction of any kind to break its force, buffeted us remorselessly as, having descended from the car which had brought us from the station, we struggled up the path to the door. Half a mile of blowing sand, with sparse, wiry grass sticking through, was between us and the breakers; yet the ocean, cold and lead-coloured, was beyond, and not so much as a finger-breadth of impediment to check the prospect. "Well, what a _place_!" said Julia again. "Let's go back, Isabella. Don't let us go in."