"It's always the way," thought the latter, despondingly. "Only for the infernal Commissioners and O'Hanlon's craze about his brain--bless the mark!--I need not have left London last month. Only for Alfred's infatuated impatience and his father's vicarious gallantry, I might be there now; and here are the Commissioners gone to sleep, O'Hanlon's head good for nothing, any number of future bills of costs, and we deserted by the object of young love and elderly gallantry! Upon my word, it's too bad. If O'Hanlon had only had the good sense to murder the Commissioners while suffering from temporary or permanent insanity, and Blake owned the good taste to run away with the widow--why, then, things would be wholesome and comfortable. As it is, they are simply-beastly." The two friends arrived late that night at the "Strand Hotel," Kilcash, and went to bed almost immediately. Neither rose early next morning, but when they did get up, they found the weather magically improved. A few high silver clouds floated against the deep blue screen of sky, beyond which one knew the stars lay; for the grass and bare branches of trees flashed and blazed, not with the yellow light of the gaudy sun, but with rays that seemed glorious memories of midnight stars. The sea in the bay was calm as a lake, and joined upon the level margin of the sand smoothly, like a steady white flame spreading out from a dull-red lake of fire. The doors of the cottages were open, and people were abroad. Thin wreaths of smoke went up from hushed hearths. Hundreds of gulls sailed slowly up and down across the mouth of the bay. Now a dog barked, now a cock crew, now a wild bird whistled. Opposite Alfred, as he stood at his window, drinking in the peace of the scene, rose the sloping sides of the bay. On them were sheep grazing. Here the salt blasts from the Atlantic would let no wheat or oats, or grain of any other kind, prosper. Nothing would grow but short, poor grass, on which sheep picked up an humble livelihood. The harvest fields of Kilcash were beyond the bay, out there on the blue depths of the ocean, that great cosmopolitan common of the races of man. Little labour was ever to be done in Kilcash. Its farms, its workshops, its mines were in the sea. No child, until he himself went to sea, ever saw his father work. The men came home not merely to their houses, but to the village to rest. When they had hauled up their boats, and carried away the nets and sails and oars and masts, their labours were at an end. The women bore the fish up to the Storm Wall, whence it was thrown into carts and creels, and driven off to Kilbarry. The visitors who came to the place in summer did not work. They came avowedly to do nothing--to idle through the sunny weather, to play at fishing, play at boating, play at swimming, to make grave business of doing nothing.