She stopped for a moment, and looked down the cliffside where Dandy was worrying himself with a rabbit hole. Hearing the cessation of our voices he looked up, and his nose was comical with red earth.

She laughed at him and then she said: "Isn't Dandy some one?"

"I'm constrained to find him somebody," said I.

She looked at me queerly for a moment—no, not queerly, for in her eyes, as it were, I felt the touch of her hand and why, I cannot tell you, for she is twenty-seven and I am forty-three, but a thought of my mother in no special sense just passed across my mind. Possibly it was because no woman has looked at me like that since she was alive; or maybe it was a sentimental imagination. The best thoughts we have, the best emotions, so I am told, are only sentimentality.

I could not tell you how long that glance of hers had lasted when out of the silence, which, like a tireless sentinel, stands guard upon those cliffs, there came the sound of nearing voices. They drew closer out of the immense stillness as figures come towards you out of a mist. We turned for an instant in their direction, and then as Dandy, hearing them too, rushed up the cliff and off into the darkness, barking wildly, Bellwattle looked at me and whispered—

"These are the Miss Fennells," and she laid her fingers tight about my wrist.

I knew then that what I had felt in her eyes was true. It had been the touch of her hand.

CHAPTER XI

There was no need for us to announce ourselves. Dandy, who in two weeks has made himself known to the whole village, had finished with every preliminary. As the three figures came in sight round a sudden bend of the cliff path, we could see him trotting amiably by their side.

There

"And the invalid," said Bellwattle, in a whisper.

"And the invalid," I repeated, below my breath, but I know she did not hear me. I scarcely heard myself.

Another moment, in which my eyes were staring through the darkness at that dim third figure which I knew to be Clarissa, and then we had met. A nervous, hurried introduction took place. I caught no word of it then but the name—Clarissa's name. They said Miss Fawdry. That was all I heard. It was what I saw which occupied all my attention. Clarissa was dressed in black—just as I had imagined. A 

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