After a short time he left the hotel, and walked out to a group of rocks that at low tide stood up bare and brown in the sunlight. Just now no one was there so he chose them as a resting-place. His tall, gaunt form, as it made its way slowly along the beach, looked out of tune with its gay surroundings. When he had seated himself, a sail came gaily round the little promontory, and glided within a few rods of him. Some one waved a handkerchief at him; he lifted his hat mechanically, and saw that it was his wife who was saluting him. Then the craft gathered speed, and reeled away out into the great blue space. Prudence, sitting in the bows, leaned forward as if to greet still more quickly the immensity and grandeur of the sea. She never tired of the ocean. Her whole face seemed to kindle; beautiful curves came to her lips as she sat there silently. The sensuous nature drank in, with a kind of dainty greediness, the scene before her. To love the beautiful passionately, to be moved strongly by it, and revel in it, and be drunk with it,--perhaps Prudence did not actually formulate the belief that to do this made her a refined person, somehow above the merely upright human being; but she certainly had a nebulous conviction to that effect. She had an unexpressed contempt for those people who pretended to be guided by their consciences, or by what they called religious principle. Of course it was all a matter of temperament, she said. She once remarked, with one of her light laughs, that she did not know what it was to be a pantheist, but she rather thought that she was one; she would be either that or a devout member of the Roman or Greek Church,--something which had a gorgeous ritual into which she could plunge her senses and stimulate them with sumptuous dreams, and images, and music, and perfume of incense. Yes, after all, she believed she preferred that kind of thing to being a pantheist; though, on second thoughts, perhaps pantheism included all these. CHAPTER XVII. "ARE YOU GOING TO MARRY LORD MAXWELL?" Carolyn Ffolliott was sitting on the piazza at Savin Hill, sitting in much the same position and with the same surroundings as when we first met her in the opening chapter of these chronicles. Only it was a year later. A year usually writes very little on the human face, though it may have brought experiences which will in time make their imprint visible. Carolyn was reading; her brother Leander was sitting on the lawn, trying to unravel the tail of a kite; her mother was walking slowly back and forth, watching her son. There was the sea, just as it had been; and apparently there were the same sails, and the same coal-barges drawn by tugs, and the same steamers far away in the offing. "It's rather stupid here this summer, don't you think?" remarked Mrs. Ffolliott; "and I'm afraid Leander isn't having as good a time as usual. Are you, Lee dear?" "Yep, bully," was the prompt reply. "Only there's Prue ain't here, you know."