It was a woman who sat on the cliffs now, watching the ocean of life, no longer a girl into whose fresh soul the sea and the waves and the air, and the whole beauty of the world, were simply responsive to her own gayety and enjoyment of living.  It was not the charming scene that held her thought, but the city with its human struggle, and in that struggle one figure was conspicuous.  In such moments this one figure of youth outweighed for her all that the world held besides.  It was strange.  Would she have admitted this?  Not in the least, not even to herself, in her virgin musings; nevertheless, the world was changed for her, it was more serious, more doubtful, richer, and more to be feared.

It was not too much to say that one season had much transformed her.  She had been so ignorant of the world a year ago.  She had taken for granted all that was abstractly right.  Now she saw that the conventions of life were like sand-dunes and barriers in the path she was expected to walk.  She had learned for one thing what money was.  Wealth had been such an accepted part of her life, since she could remember, that she had attached no importance to it, and had only just come to see what distinctions it made, and how it built a barrier round about her.  She had come to know what it was that gave her father position and distinction; and the knowledge had been forced upon her by all the obsequious flattery of society that she was, as a great heiress, something apart from others.  This position, so much envied, may be to a sensitive soul an awful isolation.

It was only recently that Evelyn had begun to be keenly aware of the circumstances that hedged her in.  They were speaking one day as they sat upon the cliffs of the season about to begin.  In it Evelyn had always had unalloyed, childish delight.  Now it seemed to her something to be borne.

“McDonald,” the girl said, abruptly, but evidently continuing her line of thought, “mamma says that Lord Montague is coming next week.”

“To be with us?”

“Oh, no.  He is to stay with the Danforth-Sibbs.  Mamma says that as he is a stranger here we must be very polite to him, and that his being here will give distinction to the season.  Do you like him?” There was in Evelyn still, with the penetration of the woman, the naivete of the child.

“I cannot say that he is personally very fascinating, but then I have never talked with him.”

“Mamma says he is very interesting about his family, and their place in England, and about his travels.  He has been in the South Sea Islands.  I asked him about them.  He said that the natives were awfully jolly, and that the climate was jolly hot.  Do you know, McDonald, that you can’t get anything out of him but exclamations and slang.  I suppose he talks to other people differently.  I tried him.  At the reception I asked him who was going to take Tennyson’s place.  He looked blank, and then said, ‘Er—­I must have missed that.  What place?  Is he out?’”