her hand to dig the plants up by the roots, and she also had an old
sack in which she put every dry stick and chip of wood she came across.
She added that she had gathered samphire at this same spot every August
end for very many years.

I prolonged the conversation, questioning her and listening with
affected interest to her mechanical answers, while trying to fathom
those unsmiling, unearthly eyes that looked so steadily at mine.

And presently, as we talked, a babble of human voices reached our ears,
and half turning we saw the crowd, or rather procession, of golfers
coming from the golf-house by the links where they had been drinking
tea. Ladies and gentlemen players, forty or more of them, following in
a loose line, in couples and small groups, on their way to the Golfers'
Hotel, a little further up the coast; a remarkably good-looking lot
with well-fed happy faces, well-dressed and in a merry mood, all freely
talking and laughing. Some were staying at the hotel, and for the
others a score or so of motor-cars were standing before its gates to
take them inland to their homes, or to houses where they were staying.

We suspended the conversation while they were passing us, within three
yards of where we stood, and as they passed the story of the links
where they had been amusing themselves since luncheon-time came into my
mind. The land there was owned by an old, an ancient, family; they had
occupied it, so it is said, since the Conquest; but the head of the
house was now poor, having no house property in London, no coal mines
in Wales, no income from any other source than the land, the twenty or
thirty thousand acres let for farming. Even so he would not have been
poor, strictly speaking, but for the sons, who preferred a life of
pleasure in town, where they probably had private establishments of