As she walked slowly down to the shore in the beautiful autumnal sunshine it seemed to her they both were dead. No message came to her from that far Italy, which was the beloved Mecca of Leslie's hopes and aspirations. He had never reached there, she told herself. Perhaps shipwreck and disaster had befallen him on the way. No thought of his forgetfulness or falsity crossed the mind of the loyal little bride. It seemed to her that death was the only thing that could have thrown that strange gulf of silence between their hearts. She sprang into the little skiff--one of her uncle's loving gifts to his niece--and suffered it to drift out into the blue waves. A fresh breeze was blowing and the water was rather rough. The breeze blew the soft, short rings of gold merrily about her white temples where the blue veins were seen wandering beneath the transparent skin. The last time she had been out rowing her hair had flouted like a banner of gold on the breeze, and her cheek had glowed crimson as the sunny side of a peach. Now the shorn locks and the marble pallor of her cheeks told a different story. Love and beauty had both left her, she thought, mournfully. Yet nature was as lovely as ever, the blue sky was mirrored as radiantly in the blue sea, the sunshine still shone brightly, the breeze still whispered as tenderly to its sweethearts, the flowers. She alone was sad. She stayed out a long while. It was so sunny and warm it seemed like a summer instead of an autumn day. The sea-gulls sported joyously above the surface of the water, now and then a silvery fish leaped up in the sunshine, its scales shining in beautiful rainbow hues, and shedding the crystal drops of spray from its body like a shower of diamonds, and the curlew's call echoed over the sea. How she had loved these things in the gay and careless girlhood that began to seem so far away in the past. "That was Bonnibel Vere," she said to herself, "the girl that never knew a sorrow. I am Bonnibel Dane, whose life must lie forever in the shadow!" She turned her course homeward, and as she stepped upon the shore she picked out a little blue sea-flower that grew in a crevice of the rock, and stood still a moment looking out over the blue expanse of ocean, and repeating some pretty lines she had always loved: "'Tis sweet to sit midst a merry throng In the woods, and hear the wild-bird's song; But sweeter far is the ceaseless dirge, The music low of the moaning surge; It frets and foams on the shell-strewn shore, Forever and ever, and evermore. I crave no flower from the wood or field, No rare exotic that hot-beds yield; Give me the weeds that wildly cling, On the barren rocks their shelter fling; Those are the flowers beloved by me-- They grow in the depths of the deep blue sea!" A sudden voice and step broke on her fancied solitude. She turned quickly and found herself face to face with the wandering sibyl, Wild Madge.