Of the first event, Damaris gradually became sensible, before her actual awakening.  She grew restless, her bed of sand seeming robbed of comfort, bleak and uneasy, so that she started up, presently, into a sitting position, rubbing her eyes with her fists baby-fashion, unable for the minute to imagine how or why she came to be lying like this out on the Bar, hatless, shoe and stockingless.  Looking about her, still in questioning bewilderment, she observed that in the south-west a great bank of cloud had risen.  It blotted out the sun, deadening all colour.  The opaline haze, turned to a dull falling mist, closed down and in, covering the sand-hills and the dark mass of Stone Horse Head and even blurring the long straight lines of the sandbank and nearer shingle.  The sea had risen, but noiselessly, creeping up and up towards her, no line of white marking the edge of its slothful oncoming.

Damaris stood up, pulling her white jersey—­the surface of it already furred with moisture—­low over her hips.  For she felt shivery, and the air was thick and chill to breathe causing a tightness in her throat.

“The glory has departed, very much departed, so I had best make haste to depart also,” she told herself; but told herself gallantly, smiling at her own strange plight in a spirit of adventure, discovering in it the excitement of novel experience.

She picked her way over the shingle and black sea litter of high-water mark, and started to run along the narrow strip between it and the advancing tide.  To run would circulate her blood, warm her through and keep her gallant humour up; still she had to own she found this heavy going, for her feet were numb and the sand seemed to pluck at and weigh them down.  Her run slackened to a walk.  Then she ventured a yard or two out into the shallow water, hoping there to meet with firmer foothold; but here it proved altogether too cold.  She had the misfortune, moreover, to tread on the top end of a razor shell, buried upright, which cut the skin making her limp from pain and sharpness of smarting.  So perforce, she took to the deep blown sand again above high-water mark, and ploughed along slowly enough in growing weariness and discomfort.

Never, surely, was any half-mile so long as this between the place of her farewell to the mottled stilt-legged birds and subsequent sleeping, and the place where she left her hat and shoes and stockings!  In the dimness and chill of the falling mist, it seemed to lengthen and lengthen to an altogether incomprehensible extent.  Time and again she stopped and scanned the ground immediately before her, certain she should see there those so lightly discarded and now so earnestly desired items of clothing.  Once in possession of them she would simply scurry home.  For visions of warm, dry pretty garments, of Mary’s, comely ministering presence, of tea, of lamp-light and—­yes, she would allow herself that culminating luxury—­of a fine log fire in the long sitting-room, presented themselves to her imagination in most alluring sequence—­the spirit of adventure, meanwhile, as must be owned, beginning to sing small and hang a diminished head.