elderly gentleman out of the hollow into which he had fallen, and
in rescuing her mother, who floated helplessly on the surface,
upheld by her skirts, like a gigantic and variegated water-lily.
Dick followed with a single gaiter. In another minute they were
safe on the opposite bank.

The elder lady gave way to tears; Maria laughed hysterically; Dick
mingled a bass oath with the now audible surf; the elder gentleman,
whose florid face the salt water had bleached, and whose dignity
seemed to have been washed away, accounted for both by saying he
thought it was a quicksand.

"It might have been," said a quiet voice behind them; "you should
have followed the sand dunes half a mile further to the estuary."

They turned instantly at the voice. It was that of the Man on the
Beach. They all rose to their feet and uttered together, save one,
the single exclamation, "James!" The elder gentleman said "Mr.
North," and, with a slight resumption of his former dignity,
buttoned his coat over his damp shirt front.

There was a silence, in which the Man on the Beach looked gravely
down upon them. If they had intended to impress him by any
suggestion of a gay, brilliant, and sensuous world beyond in their
own persons, they had failed, and they knew it. Keenly alive as
they had always been to external prepossession, they felt that they
looked forlorn and ludicrous, and that the situation lay in his
hands. The elderly lady again burst into tears of genuine
distress, Maria colored over her cheek-bones, and Dick stared at
the ground in sullen disquiet.