The moonlight changed swiftly to sunlight, the heifer lowed for her bull-calf, a sleepy chaffinch chirruped his challenge to the coming day, and Ted Cruttenden coming into the verandah from the library saw Ned entering it from the music room, while at the hall door between them stood Aurelia, blushing at being caught so early. She was in a loose, white overall, girded in at the waist with a leathern girdle, and her bare feet were shod in sandals. "Good-morning," she said, without any trace of the blush in her voice. "See what I have found under the old yew tree. Grandfather's chair had torn the turf, and there it was. Do you think it can be the snake-ring grandfather told us about?" The flat, bead-like stone she held out was no larger than a sixpence, but it had a hole through its greenish, semi-opaque lustre. "I think it must be," said Ted, passing it on to Ned. "You will have 'all the wealth of the world.' Wasn't that what it is supposed to bring?" "But I don't want money," she said. "The wealth of the world is not all money," smiled Ned, handing the stone back to her. "There is love." She laughed merrily. "I don't want that either. No! not if 'is 'air be 'ung round with gold." They waved a good-bye to her from the turn of the draw-bridge. "Till Christmas," said Ned cheerfully. "Till Christmas," replied Ted cheerfully. They found the village early astir. Miss Myfanwy Jones's holiday having come to an end, she was starting for Williams and Edwards with a pile of empty dress and bonnet boxes, which Alicia Edwards, the Reverend Morris Pugh, and the Adonis Mervyn were packing into the village shandrydan. "It is most kind of you gentlemen to be up so early," said Myfanwy, dispensing her smiles impartially. "It is no use asking you, Mr. Morris," she said, throwing a little flavouring of regret into her voice, "you are too busy and too good; but if Mr. Mervyn comes up to town I trust he will call on me." Mervyn, whose front lock looked exactly as if it had just left a curling-pin's care, nodded at her approvingly. "That would be jolly fun," he said. "I have to go up for an examination in September." "Good-bye, then, till September. Good-bye, Alicia." As she kissed the latter she whispered, "That will be a guinea to your account for the hat." "You said a pound," protested Alicia. "That was for cash, child. And what is a shilling? But two sixpences; and you shall pay when you are married, see you." CHAPTER V Would anything stop those waves except a Cornish coast? thought Helen Tressilian, as she watched the green-blue, solid water slip over a half-sunk rock, and with unabated strength, send up against a higher shelving mass a forty-foot column of reckless spray.