Then came the puzzling question, how was I to greet her when we met?  Was I to run up and kiss her, and hear her say, ‘Oh, I’m so pleased!’ as she would sometimes say when I kissed her of yore?  No:  her deportment in the morning forbade that.  Or was I to raise my hat and walk up to her saying, ’How do you do, Miss Wynne?  I’m glad to see you back, Miss Wynne,’ for she was now neither child nor young woman, she was a ‘girl.’  Perhaps I had better rush up to her in a bluff, hearty way, and say:  ’How do you do, Miss Winifred?  Delighted to see you back to Raxton.’  Finally, I decided that circumstance must guide me entirely, and I sat upon the boulder meditating.

After a while I saw, or thought I saw, in the far distance, close to the waves, a moving figure among the patches of rocks and stones (some black and some white) that break the continuity of the sand on that shore at low water.

When the figure got nearer I perceived it to be a woman, a girl, who, every now and then, was stooping as if to pick up something from the pools of water left by the ebbing tide imprisoned amid the encircling rocks.  At first I watched the figure, wondering in a lazy and dreamy way what girl could be out there so late.

But all at once I began to catch my breath and gasp The sea-smells had become laden with a kind of paradisal perfume, ineffably sweet, but difficult to breathe all of a sudden.  My heart too—­what was amiss with that?  And why did the muscles of my body seem to melt like wax?’ The lonely wanderer by the sea could be none other than Winifred.

‘It is she!’ I said.  ’There is no beach-woman or shore-prowling girl who, without raising an arm to balance her body, without a totter or a slip, could step in that way upon stones some of which are as slippery as ice with gelatinous weed and slime, while others are as sharp as razors.  To walk like that the eye must be my darling’s, that is to say, an eye as sure as a bird’s the ball of the foot must be the ball of a certain little foot I have often had in my hand wet with sea-water and gritty with sand.  For such work a mountaineer or a cragsman, or Winifred, is needed.’  Then I recalled her love of marine creatures, her delight in seaweed, of which she would weave the most astonishing chaplets and necklaces coloured like the rainbow. ‘seawood boas’ and seaweed turbans, calling herself the princess of the sea (as indeed she was), and calling me her prince.  ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘it is certainly she’; and when at last I espied a little dog by her side, Tom Wynne’s little dog Snap (a descendant of the original Snap of our never-to-be-forgotten seaside adventures)—­when I espied all these things I said, ‘Then the hour is come.’

By this time my heart had settled down to a calmer throb, the paradisal scent had become more supportable, and I grew master of myself again.  I was going towards her, when I stayed my steps, for she was already making her way, entirely unconscious of my presence, towards the boulder where I sat.