“Yes, by this time every body had forgotten him,” thought Fortune to herself, when having bidden David good-by at her door and arranged to meet him again—­he was on a visit at Brighton before matriculating at Oxford next term—­she sat down in own room, with a strangely bewildered feeling.  “Mine, all mine,” she said, and her heart closed itself over him, her old friend at least, if nothing more, with a tenacity of tenderness as silent as it was strong.

From that day, though she saw, and was determined henceforward to see, as much as she could of young David Dalziel, she never once spoke to him of Mr. Roy.

Still, to have the lad coming about her was a pleasure, a fond link with the past, and to talk to him about his future was a pleasure too.  He was the one of all the four—­Mr. Roy always said so—­who had “brains” enough to become a real student; and instead of following the others to India, he was to go to Oxford, and do his best there.  His German education had left him few English friends.  He was an affectionate, simple-hearted lad, and now that his mischievous days were done, was taking to thorough hard work.  He attached himself to his old governess with an enthusiasm that a lad in his teens often conceives for a woman still young enough to be sympathetic, and intelligent enough to guide without ruling the errant fancy of that age.  She, too, soon grew very fond of him.  It made her strangely happy, this sudden rift of sunshine out of the never-forgotten heaven of her youth, now almost as far off as heaven itself.

I have said she never spoke to David about Mr. Roy, nor did she; but sometimes he spoke, and then she listened.  It seemed to cheer her for hours, only to hear that name.  She grew stronger, gayer, younger.  Every body said how much good the sea was doing her, and so it was; but not exactly in the way people thought.  The spell of silence upon her life had been broken, and though she knew all sensible persons would esteem her in this, as in that other matter, a great “fool,” still she could not stifle a vague hope that some time or other her blank life might change.  Every little wave that swept in from the mysterious ocean, the ocean that lay between them two, seemed to carry a whispering message and lay it at her feet, “Wait and be patient, wait and be patient.”

She did wait, and the message came at last.

One day David Dalziel called, on one of his favorite daily rides, and threw a newspaper down at her door, where she was standing.

“An Indian paper my mother has just sent.  There’s something in it that will interest you, and—­”

His horse galloped off with the unfinished sentence; and supposing it was something concerning his family, she put the paper in her pocket to read at leisure while she sat on the beach.  She had almost forgotten it, as she watched the waves, full of that pleasant idleness and dreamy peace so new in her life, and which the sound of the sea so often brings to peaceful hearts, who have no dislike to its monotony, no dread of those solemn thoughts of infinitude, time and eternity, God and death and love, which it unconsciously gives, and which I think is the secret why some people say they have “such a horror of the sea-side.”