“Coom ahn!” he said, “the Miss wahnts t’ zee yu.”

I went to her room.  In the morning she had seemed better, but now looked utterly exhausted.  She had a letter in her hand.

“It’s this,” she said.  “I don’t seem to understand it.  He wants me to do something—­but I can’t think, and my eyes feel funny.  Read it to me, please.”

The letter was from Zachary.  I read it to her in a low voice, for Mrs. Hopgood was in the room, her eyes always fixed on Pasiance above her knitting.  When I’d finished, she made me read it again, and yet again.  At first she seemed pleased, almost excited, then came a weary, scornful look, and before I’d finished the third time she was asleep.  It was a remarkable letter, that seemed to bring the man right before one’s eyes.  I slipped it under her fingers on the bed-clothes, and went out.  Fancy took me to the cliff where she had fallen.  I found the point of rock where the cascade of ivy flows down the cliff; the ledge on which she had climbed was a little to my right—­a mad place.  It showed plainly what wild emotions must have been driving her!  Behind was a half-cut cornfield with a fringe of poppies, and swarms of harvest insects creeping and flying; in the uncut corn a landrail kept up a continual charring.  The sky was blue to the very horizon, and the sea wonderful, under that black wild cliff stained here and there with red.  Over the dips and hollows of the fields great white clouds hung low down above the land.  There are no brassy, east-coast skies here; but always sleepy, soft-shaped clouds, full of subtle stir and change.  Passages of Zachary’s Pearse’s letter kept rising to my lips.  After all he’s the man that his native place, and life, and blood have made him.  It is useless to expect idealists where the air is soft and things good to look on (the idealist grows where he must create beauty or comfort for himself); useless to expect a man of law and order, in one whose fathers have stared at the sea day and night for a thousand years—­the sea, full of its promises of unknown things, never quite the same, a slave to its own impulses.  Man is an imitative animal....

“Life’s hard enough,” he wrote, “without tying yourself down.  Don’t think too hardly of me!  Shall I make you happier by taking you into danger?  If I succeed you’ll be a rich woman; but I shall fail if you’re with me.  To look at you makes me soft.  At sea a man dreams of all the good things on land, he’ll dream of the heather, and honey—­you’re like that; and he’ll dream of the apple-trees, and the grass of the orchards—­you’re like that; sometimes he only lies on his back and wishes—­and you’re like that, most of all like that....”

When I was reading those words I remember a strange, soft, half-scornful look came over Pasiance’s face; and once she said, “But that’s all nonsense, isn’t it...?”