Chapter 3

SOME OLD SONGS.

"Are you dreaming again, child?" said Mrs. Rosewarne to her daughter. "You are not a fit companion for a sick woman, who is herself dull enough. Why do you always look so sad when you look at the sea, Wenna?"

The wan-faced, beautiful-eyed woman lay on a sofa, a book beside her. She had been chatting in a bright, rapid, desultory fashion about the book and a dozen other things--amusing herself really by a continual stream of playful talk--until she perceived that the girl's fancies were far away. Then she stopped suddenly, with this expression of petulant but good-natured disappointment.

"Oh, I beg your pardon, mother," said Wenna, who was seated at an open window fronting the bay. "What did you say? Why does the sea make one sad? I don't know. One feels less at home here than out on the rocks at Eglosilyan: perhaps that is it. Or the place is so beautiful that it almost makes you cry. I don't know."

And indeed Penzance Bay on this still, clear morning was beautiful enough to attract wistful eyes and call up vague and distant fancies. The cloudless sky was intensely dark in its blue: one had a notion that the unseen sun was overhead and shining vertically down. The still plain of water--so clear that the shingle could be seen through it a long way out--had no decisive color, but the fishing smacks lying out there were jet-black points in the bewildering glare. The sunlight did not seem to be in the sky, in the air or on the sea; but when you turned to the southern arm of the bay, where the low line of green hills ran out into the water, there you could see the strong clear light shining--shining on the green fields and on the sharp black lines of hedges, on that bit of gray old town with its cottage-gardens and its sea-wall, and on the line of dark rock that formed the point of the promontory. On the other side of the bay the eye followed the curve of the level shores until it caught sight of St. Michael's Mount rising palely from the water, its sunlit grays and purple shadows softened by the cool distance. Then beyond that again, on the verge of the far horizon, lay the long and narrow line of the Lizard, half lost in a silver haze. For the rest, a cool wind went this way and that through Mrs. Rosewarne's room, stirring the curtains. There was an odor of the sea in the air. It was a day for dreaming perhaps, but not for the gloom begotten of languor and an indolent pulse.

"Oh, mother! oh, mother!" Wenna cried suddenly, with a quick flush of color to her cheeks, "do you know who is coming along? Can you see? It is Mr. Trelyon, and he is looking at all the houses: I know he is looking for us."

"Child! child!" said the mother. "How should Mr. Trelyon know we are here?"

"Because I told him," Wenna said simply and hurriedly. "Mother, may I wave a handkerchief to him? Won't you come and see him? he seems so much more manly in this strange place; and how brave and handsome he looks!"

"Wenna!" her mother said severely.

The girl did not wave a handkerchief, it is true, but she knelt down at the open bay-window, so that he must needs see her; and sure enough he