was more apparent in the towans themselves than in the presence of the birds and beasts haunting their solitude. The sand was veritably alive in its power to extract from the atmosphere every color and quality. Sometimes it was golden, sometimes almost snow-white. Near sunset mauve and rose and salmon-pink trembled in waves upon its surface, and as it caught fire to welcome day, so it was eager to absorb night. Moonlight there was dazzling when, in a cold world, it was possible to count the snail-shells like pearls and watch the sand trickle from rabbit-skulls like powdered silver. Perhaps Jenny had never looked so well placed as when, with May beside her in a drift of sand, she rested against the flat fawns and creams and distant blues and grays of the background. Years ago when she danced beneath the plane tree, her scarlet dress by long use had taken on the soft texture of a pastel. Now she herself was a pastel, indescribably appropriate to the setting, with her rose-leaf cheeks buried in the high collar of a lavender-colored frieze coat, with her yellow curls and deep blue eyes, deeper with the loss of their merriment. Her hands, too, were very white in the clear sea air. May sitting beside her looked dark as a pine tree against an April larch. If Jenny was coral, May was ivory. Here they sat while the sea wind lisped over the sand. Jenny marked the beauty of the country the more carefully because she disliked so intensely the country people. Every day the sisters went for long walks, and when May was tired she would sit on the beach, while Jenny wandered on by the waves' edge. November went by with silver skies and silver sunsets, with clouds of deepest indigo and pallid effulgences of sun streaming through traveling squalls. Days of swirling rain came in with December, when Jenny would have to sit in the long room, listening to the hiss of the wind-whipped elms, watching the geranium petals lie sodden all about the paths, and the gulls, blown inland, scattered on the hillsides like paper. The nights were terrible with their hollow moanings and flappings, with the whistle and pipe of the chimneys, with crashing of unclosed doors, with rattled lattices and scud and scream and shriek and hum and roar of the wild December storms. Every morning would break to huge shapes of rain swept up the valley, one after another until the gales of dawn died away to a steady drench of water. Then Jenny would sit in the hot room, where the slab glowed quietly into the mustiness, and idly turn the damp-stained pages of year-old periodicals, of mildewed calendars, even of hymn-books. At last she would sally forth desperately, and after a long battle with wind or gurgling walk through mud and wet, she would return to a smell of pasties and saffron cake and sometimes the cleaner pungency of marinated pilchards.