The wan-faced, beautiful-eyed woman lay on a sofa, a book beside her.
She had been chatting in a bright, rapid, desultory fashion about the
book and a dozen other things--amusing herself really by a continual
stream of playful talk--until she perceived that the girl's fancies were
far away. Then she stopped suddenly, with this expression of petulant
but good-natured disappointment.

"Oh, I beg your pardon, mother," said Wenna, who was seated at an open
window fronting the bay. "What did you say? Why does the sea make one
sad? I don't know. One feels less at home here than out on the rocks at
Eglosilyan: perhaps that is it. Or the place is so beautiful that it
almost makes you cry. I don't know."

And indeed Penzance Bay on this still, clear morning was beautiful
enough to attract wistful eyes and call up vague and distant fancies.
The cloudless sky was intensely dark in its blue: one had a notion that
the unseen sun was overhead and shining vertically down. The still plain
of water--so clear that the shingle could be seen through it a long way
out--had no decisive color, but the fishing smacks lying out there were
jet-black points in the bewildering glare. The sunlight did not seem to
be in the sky, in the air or on the sea; but when you turned to the
southern arm of the bay, where the low line of green hills ran out into
the water, there you could see the strong clear light shining--shining
on the green fields and on the sharp black lines of hedges, on that bit
of gray old town with its cottage-gardens and its sea-wall, and on the
line of dark rock that formed the point of the promontory. On the other
side of the bay the eye followed the curve of the level shores until it
caught sight of St. Michael's Mount rising palely from the water, its
sunlit grays and purple shadows softened by the cool distance. Then
beyond that again, on the verge of the far horizon, lay the long and