A lady who had established herself below high-water mark with many more books than she could read, and plant capable of turning out much more work than she could do, at this point fled for safety from a rush of white foam. It went back for more, meaning to wet her through next time; but had to bear its disappointment. Mrs. Arkwright--for it was Gwendolen's mamma--being driven from the shadow of the breakwater, cast about her for a new lodgment, and perceived one beside Mrs. Fenwick, whom she thought very well for the seaside, but not to leave cards on. _Might_ she come up there, beside you? Rosalind didn't want her, but had to pretend she did, to encourage her advent. It left behind it a track of skeins and volumes, which had trickled from the fugitive, but were recovered by a domestic, and pronounced dry. Besides, they were only library books, and didn't matter. "I haven't seen you since the other day on the pier, Mrs. Fenwick, or I wanted to have asked you more about that charming young couple, the Julian Attwoods. Oh dear! I knew I should get the name wrong.... _Bradshaw!_ Yes, of course." Her vivid perception of what the name really is, when apprised of it, almost amounts to a paroxysm. You see, on the pier that day, she made a bad blunder over those Bradshaw people, and though she had consoled her conscience by admitting to her husband that she had "_mis le pied dans le plat_," still, she thought, if she was actually going to plump down on Mrs. Fenwick's piece of beach, she ought to do a little more apology. By-the-bye, why is it that ladies of her sort always resort to snippets of French idiom, whenever they get involved in a quagmire of delicacy--or indelicacy, as may be? Will Gwendolen grow like her mother? However, that doesn't concern us now. A little stiffness on Rosalind's part was really due to her wish to be by herself, but Mrs. Arkwright ascribed it to treasured resentment against her blunders of two days since. Now, she was a person who could never let anything drop--a tugging person. She proceeded to develop the subject. "Really a most interesting story! I need hardly say that my informants had given me no particulars. Very old friends of my husband's. Quite possible they really knew nothing of this young gentleman's musical gifts. Simply told my husband the tale as I told it to you. Just that the daughter of an old friend of theirs, Professor Sales Wilson--_the_ Professor Sales Wilson--of course, quite a famous name in literature--scholarship--that sort of thing--had run away with a shopman! That was what my husband heard, you know. _I_ merely repeated it." "Wasn't it, as things go, rather a malicious way of putting it--on their part?"