Leaving, then, her boxes at the station, her next anxiety was to secure a respectable, or rather genteel, lodging in the popular seaside resort confronting her.  To this end she looked about the town, in which, though she had passed through it half-a-dozen times, she was practically a stranger.

Baptista found a room to suit her over a fruiterer’s shop; where she made herself at home, and set herself in order after her journey.  An early cup of tea having revived her spirits she walked out to reconnoitre.

Being a schoolmistress she avoided looking at the schools, and having a sort of trade connection with books, she avoided looking at the booksellers; but wearying of the other shops she inspected the churches; not that for her own part she cared much about ecclesiastical edifices; but tourists looked at them, and so would she—­a proceeding for which no one would have credited her with any great originality, such, for instance, as that she subsequently showed herself to possess.  The churches soon oppressed her.  She tried the Museum, but came out because it seemed lonely and tedious.

Yet the town and the walks in this land of strawberries, these headquarters of early English flowers and fruit, were then, as always, attractive.  From the more picturesque streets she went to the town gardens, and the Pier, and the Harbour, and looked at the men at work there, loading and unloading as in the time of the Phoenicians.

‘Not Baptista?  Yes, Baptista it is!’

The words were uttered behind her.  Turning round she gave a start, and became confused, even agitated, for a moment.  Then she said in her usual undemonstrative manner, ‘O—­is it really you, Charles?’

Without speaking again at once, and with a half-smile, the new-comer glanced her over.  There was much criticism, and some resentment—­even temper—­in his eye.

‘I am going home,’ continued she.  ‘But I have missed the boat.’

He scarcely seemed to take in the meaning of this explanation, in the intensity of his critical survey.  ’Teaching still?  What a fine schoolmistress you make, Baptista, I warrant!’ he said with a slight flavour of sarcasm, which was not lost upon her.

‘I know I am nothing to brag of,’ she replied.  ’That’s why I have given up.’

‘O—­given up?  You astonish me.’

‘I hate the profession.’

‘Perhaps that’s because I am in it.’

’O no, it isn’t.  But I am going to enter on another life altogether.  I am going to be married next week to Mr. David Heddegan.’

The young man—­fortified as he was by a natural cynical pride and passionateness—­winced at this unexpected reply, notwithstanding.

‘Who is Mr. David Heddegan?’ he asked, as indifferently as lay in his power.

She informed him the bearer of the name was a general merchant of Giant’s Town, St. Maria’s island—­her father’s nearest neighbour and oldest friend.