So he strolled down on the rocks toward the breakwater with a rather slow and uncertain step. His heart was sore within him. The future was dim; in the present, one fact only stood out with dreary distinctness--he had given the best love of his life where return was not only denied, but, from the nature of things, impossible. As well toss a rose in a monkey cage as bestow a living heart on a perverse and freakish child like Elfrida, who regarded the gift merely as the means of a moment’s amusement, to be picked to pieces and then tossed to the ground. After all, was she a woman, or, as Martin had said, a wild creature, half human and half fish, for the possession of whom it was useless to contend with her cold and tempestuous lover, the sea? He caught himself almost shaking his fist in a helpless rage of jealousy at the little green waves that lapped at his feet. “Rubbish!” he said to himself, in scorn at the fanciful absurdity of his notion. But then, as the scene of last night came back to him, he shook his head in mournful bewilderment. A light clatter of stones on the breakwater above his head roused him from his reverie. Looking up, he saw a white figure hurrying silently along. “Good-morning,” he called, with a wild hope that his thoughts had translated themselves into the wild, living embodiment. There was no answer. “Miss May, is that you?” he called again. There was a moment’s pause, then Elfrida’s face, white and severe, appeared over the stone coping. “I didn’t intend that you should hear me pass,” she said, frowning. “It was these hateful old stones that gave me away.” Glyn’s heart contracted. Was his presence so disagreeable to her, then, that she chid the very stones that betrayed her presence to him? Then concern for his own pain was lost in sudden concern for the unsteadiness of her position. “Take care, please! Those stones are loose where you are standing, I can see from below here.” She smiled willfully. “Thank you, Mr. Glyn, I am quite secure. You see, this breakwater is a friend of mine. It would never go back on _me_.” In her words, as in her smile, Glyn found an echo of that laughter with which earlier in the day she had greeted Martin’s story of his narrow encounter with death. “Yes,” he replied, with a bitter sinking of the heart, “I did make rather an ass of myself last night, didn’t I?” She laughed abruptly, but made no reply. Glyn stood looking up at her as she stood on the barrier of loose stones above his head--shading her eyes with the book that she held in her hand, looking out over the sea. A sense of his own helplessness rocked Glyn’s soul in a sudden rage. He wanted her, oh, he wanted her, as she stood there, cold and immovable, defended at every point by her own scornful ignorance of common human emotion, unassailed even by the twin lords of mankind, Love and Death, which had so newly brushed closely past her.