Breakfast passed off very much as the dinner of the preceding day had done, in mutual constraint. When it was over, and both left the table, Colonel de Crespigney passed into the library, where he usually spent his mornings. It had been Gloria’s unvarying custom to follow him thither with her needlework and sit sewing in her little low chair, while he read or wrote at the table. Now, however, she could not bear to re-enter the place of the previous day’s terror. She took her garden hat and shawl from the hall rack and put them on. “Where are you going, my dear?” inquired the colonel. “For a little, solitary walk. I wish to be alone, and I need more air and exercise than I can get here. The day is so beautiful, too, that I must improve it. There are so few fine days left at this season of the year,” she answered, as she drew on her gloves. The colonel hesitated. He would rather have joined her; but her emphatic declaration that she wished a solitary walk, forbade him to force his unwelcome company upon her. “Good-morning, uncle, dear; I shall return before lunch,” she said, as she left the house. He watched her until she closed the front door behind her, and then he sighed and turned sadly to his study and shut himself in. Gloria stood on the new portico above the new terrace and looked all over the renovated domain. Terrace below terrace, the ground fell from the house down to the park wall. Below that, encircling and enclosing the round of the end, arose the high, strong, gray sea-wall, shutting out the sight of the beach. It was so solid that the only egress in that direction was through the little, substantial stone boat-house that was built against it, and whose strong, iron-bound oak doors, both landward and seaward, were kept locked. The only means of leaving the promontory was by water through the boat-house when the doors happened to be unlocked, or by land across the Rogue’s Neck when the tide was low. “Really, now that the sea-wall is rebuilt the place is more like a penitentiary than ever,” said Gloria to herself, as she walked away from the house. She wanted to get off the promontory, to take a longer walk than she could get within its limits, so she resolved to leave it by way of Rogue’s Neck and indulge in a ramble through the wintry woods on the main.