“To-morrow, if you’re a good child, you shall go for a drive.  Think—­a drive in an enchanted island.  It’s Shakespeare’s Tempest island,—­did I tell you I heard that on the boat?  We might run across Caliban any minute, and I think at least we’ll find ‘M’ and ‘F’, for Miranda and Ferdinand, cut into the bark of a tree somewhere.  We’ll go for a drive every day, every single day, till we find it.  You’ll see.”

Mrs. Newbold’s eyes moved from the sea and rested, perplexed, on her daughter.  “Katherine, how can we afford to drive every day?  How can we be here at all?  I don’t understand it.  I’m sure there was nothing left to sell except the land out west, and Mr. Seaton told us last spring that it was worthless.  How did you and Randolph conjure up the money for this beautiful journey that is going to save my life?”

The girl bent impulsively and kissed her with tender roughness.  “It is going to do that—­it is!” she cried, and her voice broke.  Then:  “Never mind how the money came, dear,—­invalids mustn’t be curious.  It strains their nerves.  Wait till you’re well and perhaps you’ll hear a tale about that land out west.”

Day after day slipped past in the lotus-eating land whose unreality makes it almost a change of planets from every-day America.  Each day brought health with great rapidity, and soon each day brought new friends.  Mrs. Newbold was full of charm, and the devotion between the ill mother and the blooming daughter was an attractive sight.  Yet the girl was not light-hearted.  Often the mother, waking in the night, heard a shivering sigh through the open door between their rooms; often she surprised a harassed look in the young eyes which, with all that the family had gone through, was new to them.  But Katherine laughed at questions, and threw herself so gayly into the pleasures which came to her that Mrs. Newbold, too happy to be analytical, let the straws pass and the wind blow where it would.

There came a balmy morning when the two were to take, with half a dozen others, the long drive to St. George’s.  The three carriage-loads set off in a pleasant hubbub from the white-paved courtyard of the hotel, and as Katherine settled her mother with much care and many rugs, her camera dropped under the wheels.  Everybody was busy, nobody was looking, and she stooped and reached for it in vain.  Then out of a blue sky a voice said: 

“I’ll get it for you,” She was pushed firmly aside and a figure in a blue coat was grovelling adventurously beneath the trap.  It came out, straightened; she had her camera; she was staring up into a face which contemplated her, which startled her, so radiant, so everything desirable it seemed to her to be.  The man’s eyes considered her a moment as she thanked him, and then he had lifted his hat and was gone, running, like a boy in a hurry for a holiday, toward the white stone landing.  An empty sail flopped big at the landing, and the girl stood and looked as he sprang in under it and took the rudder.  Joe, the head porter, the familiar friend of every one, was stowing in a rug.