“And who are these persons?” Wenna said, with another smile stealing over her face.

“Oh,” said he rather shamefacedly, “there’s no need to explain anything to you:  you always see it before one need put it in words.”

Well, perhaps it was in his manner or in the tone of his voice that there was something which seemed at this moment to touch her deeply, for she half turned and looked up at his face with her honest and earnest eyes, and said to him kindly, “Yes, I do know without you telling me; and it makes me happy to hear you talk so; and if I am unjust to you, you must not think it intentional.  And I shall try not to be so in the future.”

Mrs. Trelyon was regarding with a kindly look the two young people walking on in front of her.  Whatever pleased her son pleased her, and she was glad to see him enjoy himself in so light-hearted a fashion.  These two were chatting to each other in the friendliest manner:  sometimes they stopped to pick up wild flowers:  they were as two children together under the fair and light summer skies.

They went down and along a narrow valley, until they suddenly stood in front of the sea, the green waters of which were breaking in upon a small and lonely creek.  What strange light was this that fell from the white skies above, rendering all the objects around them sharp its outline and intense in color?  The beach before them seemed of a pale lilac, where the green waves broke in a semicircle of white.  On their right some masses of ruddy rock jutted out into the cold sea, and there were huge black caverns into which the waves dashed and roared.  On their left and far above them towered a great and isolated rock, its precipitous sides scored here and there with twisted lines of red and yellow quartz; and on the summit of this bold headland, amid the dark green of the sea-grass, they could see the dusky ruins—­the crumbling walls and doorways and battlements—­of the castle that is named in all the stories of King Arthur and his knights.  The bridge across to the mainland has, in the course of centuries, fallen away, but there, on the other side of the wide chasm, were the ruins of the other portions of the castle, scarcely to be distinguished in parts from the grass-grown rocks.  How long ago was it since Sir Tristram rode out here to the end of the world, to find the beautiful Isoulde awaiting him—­she whom he had brought from Ireland as an unwilling bride to the old king Mark?  And what of the joyous company of knights and ladies who once held high sport in the courtyard there?  Trelyon, looking shyly at his companion, could see that her eyes seemed centuries away from him.  She was quite unconscious of his covertly staring at her, for she was absently looking at the high and bare precipices, the deserted slopes of dark sea-grass and the lonely and crumbling ruins.  She was wondering whether the ghosts of those vanished people ever came back to this lonely headland, where they would find the world scarcely altered since they had left it.  Did they come at night, when the land was dark, and when there was a light over the sea only coming from the stars?  If one were to come at night alone, and to sit down here by the shore, might not one see strange things far overhead or hear some sound other than the falling of the waves?