Kingston Darnley, as usual, was late for breakfast. He had loitered pleasantly over his toilet, relieving the repellent prose of the process by frequent intervals of poetic rest at the open window. The little old diamond-paned casement of his dressing-room was open, and the crooked oak-panelled apartment was flooded with morning sunlight. Very far below, against the feet of the cliff beneath, the blue and gold of the clear water came lapping in friendship, and its lazy utterance rose faint and thin to the listener through the virginal clarity of the air. The day was not yet old enough for the haze and stress of heat: all was still clean and fresh from the cool sweetness of the night and the unclouded dawn. To the uttermost horizon spread the level floor of the sea, a glory of scent and colour, gleaming, vital, incredibly buoyant and young for all its uncounted æons of life. Again and again Kingston stayed to dally with the enormous loveliness of life, leaning from the window whence he might have dropped a pebble straight into the purple ripples a hundred feet and more below, where they played leisurely at hide-and-seek among the rocks under the cliff. It was indeed a morning to be up and alive--a morning to be naked in the naked embrace of the world. As the hours go by, the world, no less than man, puts on its clothes. Clouds and shadows and haze come up to cover the strong free limbs of the earth. It is only in the short space after sunrise in some still morning that the world stands out pure and glorious in its nudity--vivid, stainless, triumphant as the white flawlessness of the young Apollo newly risen out of the dark, formless void. The upspringing day is our emblem of youth fresh from slumber--beautiful, ardent, splendid in the clear glory of his build--before he makes haste to hide himself in the sombre, ugly trappings of convention. Kingston was in no haste to take that leap of many centuries that separates man, as Nature set him forth, from the clothed, shapeless dummy that man has made himself.