“I don’t care a doit for anybody’s cudgels, Baynham. I shall have a look at my title-deeds to-morrow; and if there’s no stipulation about the right of way, you’ll find the gates locked next Sunday morning.” Sunday morning came, and the gates at each end of the old footpath were still open, and nothing had come of Mr. Crowther’s threat. The gates had stood open so long, and were so old and rotten, their lower timbers so embedded in the soft, oozy soil, so entangled and overgrown with foxglove and fern, so encrusted with moss and lichen, that it is doubtful if anybody could have closed them. They seemed as much rooted in the ground as the great brown fir trunks which rose in rugged majesty beside them. CHAPTER XI. “WHERE THE COLD SEA RAVES.” In the keen, fresh October afternoons, there was no walk Allegra loved better than the walk to Neptune Point, and higher up by winding footpaths to the Rashleigh Mausoleum, fitting sepulchre for a race born and bred in the breath of the sea; a stately tomb perched on a rocky pinnacle at the end of a promontory, like a sea-bird’s nest overhanging the wave. Allegra was in raptures with that strange resting-place. “I like it ever so much better than your Cockneyfied cemetery,” she exclaimed. “Think how grand it must be to lie for ever within the sound of the sea--the terrible, inscrutable sea, whose anger means death--the calm, summer sea, whose waves come dancing up the sands like laughing water. I wonder whether the Rashleighs would let me have a little grave of my own somewhere among these crags and hillocks--a modest little grave, hidden under wild foliage, which nobody would ever notice? Only I should hear the sea just as well as they do in their marble tomb.” “Oh, Allegra, how can you talk so lightly of death?” said Isola, shocked at this levity. “To me it is always dreadful to think of--and yet it must come.” “Poor child!” said Allegra, with infinite pity, putting her arm round her sister-in-law’s slighter figure, as they stood by the railing of the Mausoleum, in the loveliness of an October sunset. The sun had just gone down, veiled in autumnal haze, and behind the long ridge of waters beyond the Dodman there glowed the deep crimson of the western sky. Eastward above the Polruan hills the moon moved slowly upward, amidst dark masses of cloud which melted and rolled away before her on-coming, till all the sky became of one dark azure. The two girls went down the hill in silence, Allegra holding Isola’s arm, linked with her own, steadying those weaker footsteps with the strength of her own firm movements. The difference between the two in physical force was no less marked than the difference in their mental characteristics, and Allegra’s love for her sister-in-law was tempered with a tender compassion for something so much weaker than herself.