“All right!” said Chris, springing to her feet with a flourish of her towel.  “Then good-bye!”

She shook the hair back from her face, slipped her bare feet into sandals, slung the towel across her shoulders, and turned her face to the cliffs.

They frowned above the rock-strewn beach to a height of two hundred feet, tunnelled here and there by the sea, scored here and there by springs, rising mass upon mass, in some places almost perpendicular, in others overhanging.

They possessed an immense fascination for Chris Wyndham, these cliffs.  There was a species of dreadful romance about them that attracted even while it awed her.  She longed to explore them, and yet deep in the most private recesses of her soul she was half-afraid.  So many terrible stories were told of this particular corner of the rocky coast.  So many ships were wrecked, so many lives were lost, so many hopes were quenched forever between the cliffs and the sea.

But these facts did not prevent her weaving romances about those wonderful caves.  For instance, there was the Magic Cave, for which she was bound now, the entrance to which was only accessible at low tide.  There was something particularly imposing about this entrance, something palatial, that stirred the girl’s quick fancy.  She had never before quite reached it on account of the difficulty of the approach; but she had promised herself that she would do so sooner or later, when time and tide should permit.

Both chanced to be favourable on this particular afternoon, and she set forth light-footed upon the adventure, leaving Cinders to his monotonous but all-engrossing pastime.  A wide line of rocks stretched between her and her goal, which was dimly discernible in the deep shadow of the cliff—­a mysterious opening that had the appearance of a low Gothic archway.

“I’m sure it’s haunted,” said Chris, and fell forthwith to dreaming as she stepped along the sunlit sand.

Of course she would find an enchanted hall, peopled by crabs that were not crabs at all, but the afore-mentioned knight and his retinue, all bound by the same wicked spell.  “And I shall have to find out what it is and set him free,” said Chris, with a sigh of pleasurable anticipation.  “And then, I suppose, he will begin to jabber French, and I shall wish to goodness I hadn’t.  I expect he will want to marry me, poor thing!  And I shall have to explain—­in French, ugh!—­that as he is only a foreigner I couldn’t possibly, under any circumstances, entertain such a preposterous notion for a single instant.  No, I am afraid that would sound rather rude.  How else could I put it?”

Chris’s brow wrinkled over the problem.  She had reached the outlying rocks of the belt she had to cross, and was picking her way between the pools in deep abstraction.

“I wonder!” she murmured to herself.  “I wonder!”