The woman from whom Jeanne had taken the rooms, a Mrs. Caynsard, she had seen only once or twice.  She was waited upon most of the time by an exceedingly diminutive maid servant, very shy at first, but very talkative afterwards, in broad Norfolk dialect, when she had grown a little accustomed to this very unusual lodger.  Now and then Kate Caynsard, the only daughter of the house, appeared, but for the most time she was away, sailing a fishing boat or looking after the little farm.  To Jeanne she represented a type wholly strange, but altogether interesting.  She was little over twenty years of age, but she was strong and finely built.  She had the black hair and dark brown eyes, which here and there amongst the villagers of the east coast remind one of the immigration of worsted spinners and silk weavers from Flanders and the North of France, many centuries ago.  She was very handsome but exceedingly shy.  When Jeanne, as she had done more than once, tried to talk to her, her abrupt replies gave little opening for conversation.  One morning, however, when Jeanne, having returned from a long tramp across the sand dunes, was sitting in the little orchard at the back of the house, she saw her landlady’s daughter come slowly out to her from the house.  Jeanne put down her book.

“Good morning, Miss Caynsard!” she said.

“Good morning, miss!” the girl answered awkwardly.  “You have had a long walk!”

Jeanne nodded.

“I went so far,” she said, “that I had to race the tide home, or I should have had to wade through the home creek.”

Kate nodded.

“The tide do come sometimes,” she said, “at a most awful pace.  I have been out after whelks myself, and had to walk home with the sea all round me, and nothing but a ribbon of dry land.  One needs to know the ways about on this wilderness.”

“One learns them by watching,” Jeanne remarked.  “I suppose you have lived here all your life.”

“All my life,” the girl answered, “and my father and grandfather before me.  ’Tis a queer country, but them as is born and bred here seldom leaves it.  Sometimes they try.  They go to the next village inland, or to some town, or to foreign parts, but sooner or later if they live they come back.”

Jeanne nodded sympathetically.

“It is a wonderful country,” she said.  “When I saw it first it seemed to me that it was depressing.  Now I love it!”

“And I,” the girl remarked, with a sudden passion in her tone, “I hate it!”

Jeanne looked at her, surprised.

“It sounds so strange to hear you say that,” she remarked.  “I should have thought that any one who had lived here always would have loved it.  Every day I am here I seem to discover new beauties, a new effect of colouring, a new undertone of the sea, or to hear the cry of some new bird.”