“Oh! Cicely, after so many years!”—my mother’s eyes filled. She really loved that girl, and from the depth of my heart I believe Cicely loved her, but she was too perverse to show it. “Now,” said Cicely to herself, “I’ll have no more nonsense.” By which she meant that she would drive all thoughts of Will from her head. But this is easier said and resolved on than accomplished. And you, we will say, think that your thoughts, or fancies, are in your own power, that you can trifle with them, and, when you like, put them aside. But when the day comes that you _do_ wish thus to be rid of them, then you find yourself entangled, chained in the passion, and you cannot break from it. So was it with Cicely. She thought and worked for her old father more zealously and lustily than she had for us, but only thought the more continuously on, and suffered the keener for, young Will Swan. Summer was over; autumn harvests were gathered in; Martinmas summer had brooded over the land, enveloping all in a warm, lovely haze; and then, suddenly came the change. Without warning an equinoctial gale burst on the coast, the summer was over, the brightness past—winter had come with gloom and sadness. On the evening after it had been blowing great guns all day, the door was thrown open, and one of the coastguard looked in. “Jan Crowe!” called he to Cicely’s father, who had charge over the lifeboat, “there’s the _Marianne_ wrecked.” “The _Marianne_!” Cicely uttered a cry. That was Will Swan’s vessel, or, rather, the vessel in which Will Swan was. She ran down to the beach. The sea was almost indistinguishable from the air, so lashed and shaken together was wave with wind, so intermingled were foam and rain. The air was filled with sound. The sands trembled with the beating of the surf on them. The whole sky was brown and blurred with clouds sweeping along from the west, inland, with screaming sea-birds peppered against the vapour, and salt tears dripping out of it; now driving in rushes, then staying and drawing up as a veil, and allowing the wind full play to riot and rend between the clouds and the ocean. All colour was gone out of land and sea and sky—gone as though melted together into one medley of dull grey, never to be gathered together into pure colour again. No outlines were clear. The bold points of land that ran out into the sea were so be-hazed with spoondrift and rain that they had changed their appearance, they had lost their consistency, they seemed to waver and threaten to dissolve into the seething flood that beat about them. None but an experienced eye could distinguish the _Marianne_ in the haze and tossing mass of sea. Men and women, in fluttering garments, were on the beach, with their hands to their eyes screening them, gazing seaward.