'Well,' said he, 'here we are, arrived at the fag-end of my holiday.
What a pleasant surprise my old home, which I have not thought worth
coming to see for three or four years, had in store for me!'

'You must go to-morrow?' she asked uneasily.

'Yes.'

Something seemed to overweigh them; something more than the natural
sadness of a parting which was not to be long; and he decided that
instead of leaving in the daytime as he had intended, he would defer
his departure till night, and go by the mail-train from Budmouth. This
would give him time to look into his father's quarries, and enable her,
if she chose, to walk with him along the beach as far as to Henry the
Eighth's Castle above the sands, where they could linger and watch the
moon rise over the sea. She said she thought she could come.

So after spending the next day with his father in the quarries Jocelyn
prepared to leave, and at the time appointed set out from the stone
house of his birth in this stone isle to walk to Budmouth-Regis by the
path along the beach, Avice having some time earlier gone down to see
some friends in the Street of Wells, which was halfway towards the spot
of their tryst. The descent soon brought him to the pebble bank, and
leaving behind him the last houses of the isle, and the ruins of the
village destroyed by the November gale of 1824, he struck out along the
narrow thread of land. When he had walked a hundred yards he stopped,
turned aside to the pebble ridge which walled out the sea, and sat down
to wait for her.

Between him and the lights of the ships riding at anchor in the