But on a sudden, raising her eyes from their persistent search, Damaris realized she must have missed and already passed the spot.  For she was close upon the tract of sand-hills—­a picture of desolation in the sullen murk, the winding hollows between their pale formless elevations bearing a harsh growth of neutral tinted sword-like grasses.

She had come too far by a quarter of a mile at least, so she judged, and must turn her face eastward again and laboriously plough her way back.  But the return journey was crowned with no better success than the outward one.  Carefully, methodically she quartered the beach; but simply her things weren’t there, had vanished, leaving neither token or trace.

She was confronted moreover by the unpleasant fact that it grew late.  Soon the dusk would fall, its coming hastened by the mist, now settling into a steady drizzle of rain precursor of a dark and early night.  To hunt any longer would be useless.  She must give it up.  Yet her maidenly pride, her sense of what is seemly and becoming, revolted from exposing herself to Timothy Proud’s coarse leering glances or even—­should he by luck be her waterman—­to Jennifer’s more respectful curiosity, dishevelled and but half-dressed as she was.  And then the actual distance to be traversed appeared to her dishearteningly great.  For she was weary—­quite abominably weary now she came to think of it.  Her feet were bruised and blistered.  They ached.  Her throat ached too, and she shivered.  Cold, though it was, she must wait a minute or two and rest before attempting the ascent of the slope.

Damaris sat down, pulling her skirts as low as they would come over her bare legs, and clasping her hands round her knees, bowed, huddled together to gain, if it might be, some sensation of warmth.  For a little she thought of that only—­warmth—­her mind otherwise a blank.  But soon the consuming sadness of the place in the waning light penetrated her imagination, penetrated, indeed, her whole being.  Only a few hours ago she had danced here, in ecstasy born of the sunshine, the colour, the apparently inexhaustible beauty of things uncreated by, and independent of, the will and work of man.  Contrast that scene, and the radiant emotion evoked by it, with this?  Which was real, the enduring revelation?  Was this truth; the other no more than mirage—­an exquisite dissembling and lovely lie?

Such thoughts are hardly wholesome at eighteen—­hardly wholesome perhaps at any age, if life is to be lived sweetly, with honest profit to one’s own soul and to the souls of others.  Yet remembering back, down the dim avenues of childhood, Damaris knew she did not formulate the question, entertain the suspicion, for the first time.  Only, until now, it had stayed in the vague, a shapeless nightmare horror, past which she could force herself to run with shut eyes.  It didn’t jump out of the vague, thank goodness, and bar her passage.  But now no running or shutting