A certain wisdom, not all of this world, could never be hers, as Mrs. Stoddart had said, but neither could caution, or distrust, or half-heartedness, or self-regard. Those thorny barricades against the tender feet of love would never be hers either. Ah, fortunate Annette! It seems, after all, as if some very simple, unsuspicious folk can do without wisdom, can well afford to leave it to us, who are neither simple nor trustful. Still hand in hand, they reached the shoulder of the low headland, and sat down on the sun-warmed, gossamer-threaded grass. The ground fell below their eyes to the long staked marsh-lands of the Rieben, steeped in a shimmer of haze. Somewhere, as in some other world, sheep-bells tinkled, mingled with the faint clamour of sea-birds on the misty flats. The pale river gleamed ethereal as the gleaming gossamer on the grass, and beyond it a sea of pearl was merged in a sky of pearl. Was anything real and tangible? Might not the whole vanish at a touch? They could not speak to each other. At last she whispered-- "The sea is still there." She had thought as there was a new heaven and a new earth that there would be no more sea. But there it was. God had evidently changed His mind. A minute speck appeared upon it. Roger pulled himself together. "That's the Harwich boat," he said, "or it may be one of Moy's coaling-ships. I rather think it is." He gazed with evident relish at the small puff of smoke. He experienced a certain relief in its advent, as one who descries a familiar face in a foreign crowd. He said he wished he had brought his glasses, as then he could have identified it. And he pointed out to her, far away in the mist, the crumbling headlands of the Suffolk coast, and the church tower of Dunwich, half lost in the sea haze, waiting for the next storm to engulf it. Recalled to a remembrance of their destination by the coal-boat, they rose and walked slowly on towards the old stone cross standing bluntly up against a great world of sky. Mr. Stirling and Mrs. Stoddart were sitting under it; and close at hand a spring bubbled up, which slipped amid tumbled stone and ling to a little pond, the margin fretted by the tiny feet of sheep, and then wavered towards the Rieben as circuitously as the Rieben wavered to the sea. There was nothing left of the anchorite's cell save scattered stones, and the shred of wall on which Mrs. Stoddart was sitting. But a disciple of Julian of Norwich had dwelt there once, Mr. Stirling told them, visited, so the legend went, by the deer of the forest when the moss on their horns fretted them, and by sick wolves with thorns in their feet, and by bishops and princes and knights and coifed dames, with thorns in their souls. And she healed and comforted them all. And later on Queen Mary had raised the cross to mark the spot where the saint of the Catholic Church had lived, as some said close on a hundred years.