Without looking about her, without caring what place she chose, she seated herself on the shingle.  The only persons who were near to her, in the position she now occupied, were a nursemaid and two little boys.  The youngest of the two had a tiny toy-ship in his hand.  After looking at Magdalen for a little while with the quaintest gravity and attention, the boy suddenly approached her, and opened the way to an acquaintance by putting his toy composedly on her lap.

“Look at my ship,” said the child, crossing his hands on Magdalen’s knee.

She was not usually patient with children.  In happier days she would not have met the boy’s advance toward her as she met it now.  The hard despair in her eyes left them suddenly; her fast-closed lips parted and trembled.  She put the ship back into the child’s hands and lifted him on her lap.

“Will you give me a kiss?” she said, faintly.  The boy looked at his ship as if he would rather have kissed the ship.

She repeated the question—­repeated it almost humbly.  The child put his hand up to her neck and kissed her.

“If I was your sister, would you love me?” All the misery of her friendless position, all the wasted tenderness of her heart, poured from her in those words.

“Would you love me?” she repeated, hiding her face on the bosom of the child’s frock.

“Yes,” said the boy.  “Look at my ship.”

She looked at the ship through her gathering tears.

“What do you call it?” she asked, trying ha rd to find her way even to the interest of a child.

“I call it Uncle Kirke’s ship,” said the boy.  “Uncle Kirke has gone away.”

The name recalled nothing to her memory.  No remembrances but old remembrances lived in her now.  “Gone?” she repeated absently, thinking what she should say to her little friend next.

“Yes,” said the boy.  “Gone to China.”

Even from the lips of a child that word struck her to the heart.  She put Kirke’s little nephew off her lap, and instantly left the beach.

As she turned back to the house, the struggle of the past night renewed itself in her mind.  But the sense of relief which the child had brought to her, the reviving tenderness which she had felt while he sat on her knee, influenced her still.  She was conscious of a dawning hope, opening freshly on her thoughts, as the boy’s innocent eyes had opened on her face when he came to her on the beach.  Was it too late to turn back?  Once more she asked herself that question, and now, for the first time, she asked it in doubt.

She ran up to her own room with a lurking distrust in her changed self which warned her to act, and not to think.  Without waiting to remove her shawl or to take off her hat, she opened her writing-case and addressed these lines to Captain Wragge as fast as her pen could trace them: 

“You will find the money I promised you inclosed in this.  My resolution has failed me.  The horror of marrying him is more than I can face.  I have left Aldborough.  Pity my weakness, and forget me.  Let us never meet again.”