‘This is rest,’ he answered.
The next moment, the ridge of the shingle was passed, and Ethel’s feet were sinking in the depth of pebbles, her cheeks freshened by the breeze, her lips salted by the spray tossed in by the wind from the wave crests. At the edge of the water she stood—as all others stand there—watching the heaving from far away come nearer, nearer, curl over in its pride of green glassy beauty, fall into foam, and draw back, making the pebbles crash their accompanying ‘frsch.’ The repetition, the peaceful majesty, the blue expanse, the straight horizon, so impressed her spirit as to rivet her eyes and chain her lips; and she receded step by step before the tide, unheeding anything else, not even perceiving her companion’s eyes fixed on her, half curiously, half sadly.
‘Well, Ethel,’ at last he said.
‘I never guessed it!’ she said, with a gasp. ‘No wonder Harry cannot bear to be away from it. Must we leave it?’ as he moved back.
‘Only to smooth ground,’ said Dr. Spencer; ‘it is too dark to stay here among the stones and crab-pots.’
The summer twilight was closing in; lights shining in the village under the cliffs, and looking mysterious on distant points of the coast; stars were shining forth in the pale blue sky, and the young moon shedding a silver rippled beam on the water.
‘If papa were but here!’ said Ethel, wakening from another gaze, and recollecting that she was not making herself agreeable.
‘So you like the expedition?’
‘The fit answer to that would be, “It is very pretty,” as the Cockney said to Coleridge at Lodore.’
‘So I have converted a Stoneborough fungus!’
‘What! to say the sea is glorious? A grand conversion!’
‘To find anything superior to Minster Street.’
‘Ah, you are but half reclaimed! You are a living instance that there is no content unless one has begun life as a fungus.’
She was startled by his change of tone. ‘True, Ethel. Content might have been won, if there had been resolution to begin without it.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ she faltered, ‘I ought not to have said it. I forgot there was such a cause.’
‘Cause—you know nothing about it.’
She was silent, distressed, dismayed, fearing that she had spoken wrongly, and had either mistaken or been misunderstood.
‘Tell me, Ethel,’ he presently said, ‘what can you know of what made me a wanderer?’
‘Only what papa told me.’
‘He—he was the last person to know.’
‘He told me,’ said Ethel, hurrying it out in a fright, ‘that you went away—out of generosity—not to interfere with his happiness.’
Then she felt as if she had done a shocking thing, and waited anxiously, while Dr. Spencer deliberately made a deep hole in the shingle with his stick. ‘Well,’ at last he said, ‘I thought that matter was unknown to all men—above all to Dick!’
‘It was only after you were gone, that he put things together and made it out.’
‘Did—she—know?’ said Dr. Spencer, with a long breath.
‘I cannot tell,’ said Ethel.
‘And how or why did he tell you?’ (rather hurt.)
‘It was when first you came. I am sure no one else knows it. But he told me because he could not help it; he was so sorry for you.’
They walked the whole length of the parade, and had turned before Dr. Spencer spoke again; and then he said, ‘It is strange! My one vision was of walking on the sea-shore with her; and that just doing so with you should have brought up the whole as fresh as five-and-thirty years ago!’
‘I wish I was more like her,’ said Ethel.
No more was wanting to make him launch into the descriptions, dear to a daughter’s heart, of her mother in her sweet serious bloom of young womanhood, giving new embellishments to the character already so closely enshrined in his hearer’s heart, the more valuable that the stream of treasured recollection flowed on in partial oblivion of the person to whom it was addressed, or, at least, that she was the child of his rival; for, from the portrait of the quiet bright maiden, he passed to the sufferings that his own reserved nature had undergone from his friend’s outspoken enthusiasm. The professor’s visible preference for the youth of secure prospects, had not so much discouraged as stung him; and in a moment of irritation at the professor’s treatment, and the exulting hopes of his unconscious friend, he had sworn to himself, that the first involuntary token of regard from the young lady towards one or the other, should decide him whether to win name and position for her sake, or to carry his slighted passion to the utmost parts of the earth, and never again see her face.
‘Ethel,’ he said, stopping short, ‘never threaten Providence—above all, never keep the threat.’
Ethel scarcely durst speak, in her anxiety to know what cast the die, though with all Dr. Spencer’s charms, she could not but pity the delusion that could have made him hope to be preferred to her father—above all, by her mother. Nor could she clearly understand from him what had dispelled his hopes. Something it was that took place at the picnic on Arthur’s Seat, of which she had previously heard as a period of untold bliss. That something, still left in vague mystery, had sealed the fate of the two friends.
‘And so,’ said Dr. Spencer, ‘I took the first foreign appointment that offered. And my poor father, who had spent his utmost on me, and had been disappointed in all his sons, was most of all disappointed in me. I held myself
