“By the way,” he continued with a smile, “my mother is very anxious about Miss Wenna’s return.  I fancy she has been trying to go into that business of the sewing club on her own account; and in that case she would be sure to get into a mess.  I know her first impulse would be to pay any money to smooth matters over, but that would be a bad beginning, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, it would,” Wenna said, but somehow, at this moment, she was less inclined to be hopeful about the future.

“And as for you, Mrs. Rosewarne,” he said, “I suppose you will be going home soon, now that the change seems to have done you so much good?”

“Yes, I hope so,” she said, “but Wenna must go first.  My husband writes to me that he cannot do without her, and offers to send Mabyn instead.  Nobody seems to be able to get on without our Wenna.”

“And yet she has the most curious fancy that she is of no account to anybody.  Why, some day I expect to hear of the people in Eglosilyan holding a public meeting to present her with a service of plate and an address written on parchment with blue and gold letters.”

“Perhaps they will do that when she gets married,” the mother said, ignorant of the stab she was dealing.

It was a picturesque and pleasant bit of country through which they were driving, yet to two of them at least the afternoon sun seemed to shine over it with a certain sadness.  It was as if they were bidding good-bye to some beautiful scene they could scarcely expect to revisit.  For many a day thereafter, indeed, Wenna seemed to recollect that drive as though it had happened in a dream.  She remembered the rough and lonely road leading up sharp hills and getting down into valleys again, the masses of ferns and wild-flowers by the stone walls, the wild and undulating country, with its stretches of yellow furze, its clumps of trees and its huge blocks of gray granite.  She remembered their passing into a curious little valley, densely wooded, the winding path of which was not well fitted for a broad carriage and a pair of horses.  They had to watch the boughs and branches as they jolted by.  The sun was warm among the foliage:  there was a resinous scent of ferns about.  By and by the valley abruptly opened on a wide and beautiful picture.  Lamorna Cove lay before them, and a cold fresh breeze came in from the sea.  Here the world seemed to cease suddenly.  All around them were huge rocks and wild-flowers and trees; and far up there on their left rose a hill of granite, burning red with the sunset; but down below them the strange little harbor was in shadow, and the sea beyond, catching nothing of the glow in the west, was gray and mystic and silent.  Not a ship was visible on that pale plain; no human being could be seen about the stone quays and the cottages; it seemed as if they had come to the end of the world, and were its last inhabitants.  All these things Wenna thought of in after days, until the odd and plain little harbor of Lamorna, and its rocks and bushes and slopes of granite, seemed to be some bit of Fairyland, steeped in the rich hues of the sunset, and yet ethereal, distant and unrecoverable.