There was no more to be said. Eustace thanked Mrs. Willows for her compliance with his wishes, and took his departure. He went out into the High Street of Bayham very little wiser than when he had entered the prosperous emporium of Kimber and Willows. He walked slowly along the quiet street, and found himself by and by on the outskirts of the town, strolling onward in an objectless manner, and meditating upon his mother’s broken story. When he paused for the first time to look about him he was face to face with the sea. Behind him a terrace of white houses reflected the full blaze of the southern sun. Before him lay the bay--a wide expanse of tawny sand, with pools of sunlit water glimmering here and there. The tide was low, and the sandy amphitheatre lay open to the foot of the pedestrian. On one side of the bay rose a tall cliff; on the other a stretch of sand lay beyond the jutting line of rocks. Eustace crossed the bay in this direction. He wanted to see the place in which Celia Mayfield had walked with her false lover, and he knew that this lonely stretch of sand beyond the rocks must be the spot alluded to in his father’s letters, and mentioned that day by Mrs. Willows. It was a fit spot for a lovers’ trysting-place--remote from the voices of the little town, and yet within the sound of church-bells, which took a silvery tone as they floated hitherward across the rippling water. Summer visitors to Bayham rarely penetrated beyond the screen of rocks which sheltered the bay, and this smooth stretch of sand was not often invaded by the spades and barrows of noisy children or the feet of idle damsels. It was an enchanted cove, which might have been sacred to the sea-nymphs, so seldom did human creatures disturb its poetic calm. Here Eustace lingered for some time, still meditating the story of his mother’s youth, and with strangely intermingled feelings of tenderness and anger in his heart. How could he ever think of _her_ with sufficient love and pity? How could he ever think of her destroyer without considering how he should avenge her wrongs? “So trusting, so childlike, and deceived so cruelly! What a villain he must have been! what an unutterable villain!” thought Celia’s son, as he contemplated the scene of his mother’s love-story. It should have been such a sweet idyll--a modern fairy tale of rustic beauty and princely truth and chivalry--and it had been instead so dark a history of falsehood and shame.