by the trail of wood-fire smoke, and the air was wonderfully salt and
brisk. Indeed it was too cold to stand still. Mrs. Ambrose drew her arm
within her husband's, and as they moved off it could be seen from the
way in which her sloping cheek turned up to his that she had something
private to communicate. They went a few paces and Rachel saw them kiss.

Down she looked into the depth of the sea. While it was slightly
disturbed on the surface by the passage of the _Euphrosyne_, beneath it
was green and dim, and it grew dimmer and dimmer until the sand at the
bottom was only a pale blur. One could scarcely see the black ribs of
wrecked ships, or the spiral towers made by the burrowings of great
eels, or the smooth green-sided monsters who came by flickering this way
and that.

--"And, Rachel, if any one wants me, I'm busy till one," said her
father, enforcing his words as he often did, when he spoke to his
daughter, by a smart blow upon the shoulder.

"Until one," he repeated. "And you'll find yourself some employment, eh?
Scales, French, a little German, eh? There's Mr. Pepper who knows more
about separable verbs than any man in Europe, eh?" and he went off
laughing. Rachel laughed, too, as indeed she had laughed ever since she
could remember, without thinking it funny, but because she admired her
father.

But just as she was turning with a view perhaps to finding some
employment, she was intercepted by a woman who was so broad and so thick
that to be intercepted by her was inevitable. The discreet tentative way
in which she moved, together with her sober black dress, showed that
she belonged to the lower orders; nevertheless she took up a rock-like