They spent long hours together by the ebb and flow of the tide.  Lydia almost forgot her troubles now and then.  As for Thyrza, she seemed to drink ecstasy from the live air.

‘It’s a good friend to me,’ she said several times, looking out upon the grey old deep.  ’It’s made me well again, Lyddy.  I shall always love the sound of it, and the salt taste on my lips!’

CHAPTER XXX

MOVEMENTS

‘We are going first of all to the Pilkingtons’, in Warwickshire,’ said Annabel, talking with Mrs. Ormonde at the latter’s hotel in the last week of July.  ’Mr. Lanyard—­the poet, you know—­will be there; I am curious to see him.  Father remembers him a ’scrubby starveling’—­to use his phrase—­a reviewer of novels for some literary paper.  He has just married Lady Emily Quell—­you heard of it?  How paltry it is for people to laugh and sneer whenever a poor man marries a rich woman.  I know nothing of him except from his poetry, but that convinces me that he is above sordid motives.’

‘Then you do still retain some of your idealism, Bell?’

‘All that I ever had, I hope.  Why?  You have feared for me?’

‘Pitch!  Pitch!’

‘Yes, I know,’ Annabel answered, rather absently, letting her eyes stray.  ’Never mind.  You had something particular to say to me, Mrs. Ormonde.’

‘Yes, I have a good-bye for you from an old acquaintance.’

Annabel’s complexion had not borne the season as well as those of women whose whole and sole preoccupation it is to combat Nature in the matter of their personal appearance.  Her tint was, as they say, a little fatigued.  Fatigued, too, were her eyes, which seemed ever looking for something lost; that gaze she had in sitting by Ullswater with ‘Sesame and Lilies’ on her lap would not be easily recovered.  Her beauty was of rarer quality and infinitely more suggestive than on that day something more than a year ago; to the modern mind nothing is complete that has not an element of morbidity.  At Mrs. Ormonde’s words she turned with grave interest.

‘Where, then, is he going?’ she asked, just smiling.

’To a small manufacturing town in Pennsylvania.  His firm has just opened works there, and he has it in view to prepare himself for superintending them.’

‘You are serious?’

’Quite.  I think it was chiefly my persuasion that decided him.  I have no doubt that in a year or two he will thank me, though he is not very ardent about it at present.’

‘But surely he—­No, I think you are right.’

‘I have not advised him to become an American,’ Mrs. Ormonde continued, smiling, when Annabel abandoned an apparent intention of saying more.  ’No doubt he will come to England now and then, and probably, with his disposition, he will some day make his home here again.  I hardly expect to see him for some two years.’

‘I hope it is right.  I think it is.’