And the sky was so blue, the sun so hot, bringing out all the aromatic odours of the cliff herbs. How sweet they were! It would almost be worth while to be a humble bee to work so busily among the purple thyme. She let some heads of it she had picked fall on her lap with a little listless gesture. Yes! to work instead of droning out the days. To work as Herbert, the dead young husband of her dreams, had meant to work. It was seven years since she had lost him in Italy, whither they had gone on their honeymoon for his health. So he lay there dead through the breaking of a blood vessel; dead without a good-bye; dead under the blue sky amid the orange blossoms, while she, after her mother's death, kept house for her father, Sir Geoffrey Pentreath. And still on her roughest serge suits she wore the conventional muslin of widowhood round her throat and wrists. And in her heart? In her heart she had set up such a fetich of bereavement that the idea of a second marriage was unthinkable. Yet it would have been advisable. The death of her only brother in South Africa sent the few farms, which was all that remained of the great Pentreath estates, to a distant cousin, and for long years past Sir Geoffrey had had no ready money. Poor father! It was the thought of her which made him---- She glanced to the left, over a great scaur of tumbled rocks like some giant's house in ruins, gave a little shiver and buried her face in her hands. Poor father! Yet how could he? And how could he be mixed up with all those fateful, hateful people with money, who brought their _chauffeurs_ to the old serving-hall at the Keep? Those _chauffeurs_ were the bane of her life; for what should she give them to eat! Some one from behind clasped her wrists close, and held her hands still on her eyes. "Guess!" said a sepulchrally gruff voice. "My dear Ned! Where have you come from?" she answered gaily. "How did you find out?" asked Ned Blackborough, seating himself on the thyme beside her. "As if any one but Ned Cruttenden--I can't help the name, my dear--was ever quite so hoarse!" "By George, Nell," he said, looking seawards, "it is good to be here. That's what one always says, isn't it, when the visible Body of the Lord is transfigured before one's eyes as it is now." "You know, Ned, I do not agree with your Buddhistic notions," she said, a trifle severely. "Beg pardon! They're not Buddhistic; but I'm always forgetting you don't like--though you will some day! Meanwhile I want to ask you a question: and as the butler told me you would be on the coast somewhere ... you've a most superior set of London servants just now, Nell----" "To keep the _chauffeurs_ company," she interrupted, shrugging her shoulders. "One must--but don't let's talk of it--it's sickening---- And so you came to the old place?"