What a charm there was about everything!  Occasionally the mist became so thin that a long line of coast and a great breadth of sea were visible, with the white sails drifting.

“There’s nothing like it,” said King—­“there’s nothing like this island.  It seems as if the Creator had determined to show man, once for all, a landscape perfectly refined, you might almost say with the beauty of high-breeding, refined in outline, color, everything softened into loveliness, and yet touched with the wild quality of picturesqueness.”

“It’s just a dream at this moment,” murmured Irene.  They were standing on a promontory of rock.  “See those figures of people there through the mist—­silhouettes only.  And look at that vessel—­there—­no—­it has gone.”

As she was speaking, a sail-vessel began to loom up large in the mysterious haze.  But was it not the ghost of a ship?  For an instant it was coming, coming; it was distinct; and when it was plainly in sight it faded away, like a dissolving view, and was gone.  The appearance was unreal.  What made it more spectral was the bell on the reefs, swinging in its triangle, always sounding, and the momentary scream of the fog-whistle.  It was like an enchanted coast.  Regaining the carriage, they drove out to the end, Agassiz’s Point, where, when the mist lifted, they saw the sea all round dotted with sails, the irregular coasts and islands with headlands and lighthouses, all the picture still, land and water in a summer swoon.

Late that afternoon all the party were out upon the cliff path in front of the cottages.  There is no more lovely sea stroll in the world, the way winding over the cliff edge by the turquoise sea, where the turf, close cut and green as Erin, set with flower beds and dotted with noble trees, slopes down, a broad pleasure park, from the stately and picturesque villas.  But it was a social mistake to go there on Sunday.  Perhaps it is not the height of good form to walk there any day, but Mr. King did not know that the fashion had changed, and that on Sunday this lovely promenade belongs to the butlers and the upper maids, especially to the butlers, who make it resplendent on Sunday afternoons when the weather is good.  As the weather had thickened in the late afternoon, our party walked in a dumb-show, listening to the soft swish of the waves on the rocks below, and watching the figures of other promenaders, who were good enough ladies and gentlemen in this friendly mist.

The next day Mr. King made a worse mistake.  He remembered that at high noon everybody went down to the first beach, a charming sheltered place at the bottom of the bay, where the rollers tumble in finely from the south, to bathe or see others bathe.  The beach used to be lined with carriages at that hour, and the surf, for a quarter of a mile, presented the appearance of a line of picturesquely clad skirmishers going out to battle with the surf.  Today there were not half a dozen carriages and omnibuses altogether, and the bathers were few-nursery maids, fragments of a day-excursion, and some of the fair conventionists.  Newport was not there.  Mr. King had led his party into another social blunder.  It has ceased to be fashionable to bathe at Newport.