The light shore breeze of a September morning was dying out across the bay. The wide Atlantic beyond it seemed flat as a floor of sapphire inlaid with pale veins of green. The sky was without a cloud; and the sun filled the unstirred silence with a clear golden heat.  
The high gray cliffs that held the bay, hid, at either end, the land beyond it; half hid even, by a curve of their contour, the entrance to Ballindra River, so that no sign of habitation was to be seen along the shore.
 
The blue spaces of the sea were empty, save for a little lug-rigged boat which had slipped out of the river while the mists still slept upon it, and had spent the morning creeping with each soft breath of air to the northern border of the bay.
 
It was now close to land, so close that the object of its journey could be plainly seen.
 
Before it, cradled, under the cliffs, between the serried ledges of rock, was a tiny beach.
 
It was in shape like a young moon, paved in silvery pink and pearl by milk-white pebbles and delicate shells, with shelving wings of stone thrust out and bent inward from either side into the sea.
 
The long ledges of rock were of a dark lavender, and from them a brilliant yellow weed dripped and swung in the transparent pool of purple and emerald, which throbbed softly against the pearly crescent of the shore.
 
East and west, so far as eye could reach, the sea pushed a sparkling shoulder against the sheer front of the cliffs. Nowhere else in the whole bay was there a foot's breadth of beach, and there was clearly no outlet landwards even from the slender strand towards which the boat was heading.
 
A girl with fair hair and luminous gray eyes was steering, and a man of about thirty sat upon the opposite gunwale with the slack sheet in his hand. She looked up at the flapping leech, and then with a whimsical smile into his face.
 
"You'll have to row in," she said.
 
"Not I," he protested airily; "we're going to sail."
 
She laughed a low contented laugh at his perversity.
 
"Like this?" she enquired, tilting her head at the empty canvas.
 
"Give the wind time," he replied, with a glance across the bay and a big indrawn breath of complete satisfaction; "we've the whole day before us."
 
"We haven't the whole channel, though," she said, nodding to starboard, where a black fin of rock cut suddenly in the clear water a little whispering ring of foam.
 
"Phew!" exclaimed the man, screwing round on the gunwale as the black fin disappeared. "Many like that?"
 
"Plenty, plenty!" laughed the girl. "Are you going to row?"
 
He shook his head. Then, with an effect of having completely forgotten her, stared eagerly across that wavering jewel of water at the rose and silver of the beach, and down through the transparent purple depths beneath him at the sand and the rocks and the waving yellow weed.
 
She watched his face brighten with their beauty, as though somehow he had absorbed it, and his grave good looks take on a boyish lightness, as his eyes turned from colour to colour, or followed the sea-fern streaming in the pulse of the tide. Leaning forward with a smile she laid her hand on the cleat in front of her and let the halyard go. The brown sail ran down till the parrel jammed, and Maurice Caragh faced round reproachfully.
 
"Why don't you want to row?" she cried. "It isn't a hundred yards."
 
"No, I know," he sighed, as he freed the clip of the traveller and gathered in the bunt; "but a sail looks so much more adventurous."
 
"Even in a calm?" she smiled.
 
"Oh, yes, most in a calm," he replied, seating himself disconsolately on the thwart in front of her, and slowly pushing out a sweep. "Adventure's nothing with a full sail, but all the fear of the sea is in the flat one. Look here!" he continued, without change of tone, "the rowlocks are gone."
 
She thrust out the point of a little white shoe at the place where they lay beneath his thwart, and he pushed them resignedly into their chocks, and pulled for the shore; Lettice Nevern standing up with her finger tips on the tiller behind her, and her eye intent upon the channel.
 
Her quick emphatic directions amused the man who was rowing, as the boat wound through the invisible maze.
 
"Goodness!" he exclaimed, backing hard with his left, "I shouldn't care to bring a boat in here with a bit of wind."
 
"You couldn't," she replied, "with any wind but what we've got. That's what I like about it. There are not ten days in the year you can dare to land here. But this half tide is the worst; it's easier with less or more water."
 
"Do you ever come here by yourself?" he asked, resting on the oars.
 
"I've always come by myself," she answered, looking down into his face, "that's why"—she hesitated for a moment—"that's why I didn't bring you before."
 
The reason might not have seemed explicit to another, but it carried a sense of privilege to Caragh's mind that troubled the look with which he acknowledged it.
 
"I hope I mayn't prove unworthy of it," he said gravely.
 
"I don't know," she answered, with an absent glance at him: "it's a very dear little beach."
 
He was willing to admit, when he landed, that it might be anything she pleased to call it, but there was chiefly wonder in his eye. The bands of tiny white and silver pebbles, and of tinier pink shells, made a floor so delicate, so incredibly dainty as seemed, in that land of legend, proof sufficient of a fairy's treading.
 
The water lay so still and clear against it that only by the brighter tint of the covered pebbles could the margin of the sea be told, and the moving tide that swayed the weed made all along the curved strand a little whispering song, unlike any other music in the world.
 
Lettice enjoyed Caragh's bewilderment for a moment, but stopped him as he was bringing the cable ashore.
 
"You must moor her out," she said.
 
"Oh, no!" he pleaded, "the tide's rising, and she'll look so jolly and so impossible nosing along the shore with all that water under her, on the very edge of an ocean."
 
But Lettice was inflexible. The tide would be lower she said by the time they started; and Maurice had to shove the boat out again, and succeeded, after a couple of vain attempts, in jerking the anchor off her bow on to a holding bottom.
 
"Oh, well," he said cheerfully, eyeing the result of his labour, while he unpacked the luncheon, "she looks very well out there; only I wish I'd put up the sail."
 
"Are you quite mad to-day?" the girl asked.
 
She sat watching him with an air of grave amusement; her feet drawn up and her hands clasped below her knees. She wore a white serge coat and skirt, with a biscuit-coloured silk shirt and a ribbon of the same shade round her sailor hat. She looked much younger than her twenty-three years, though the baby-fairness of her hair and skin were sobered by the quiet depths of her gray eyes.
 
"I'm never mad," said Caragh to her question, holding up the red length of a lobster against the sky, "but sometimes, with you, I'm less distressingly sane than usual."
 
Lettice, her hands fallen to her ankles, watched him sideways, with one temple resting on her knee.
 
"That's the reflection of my foolishness, I suppose?" she said.
 
"Possibly!" he assented; "I'm very highly polished."
 
He was sitting with his feet towards the sea, unpacking the hamper on to a spread cloth beside him. He viewed the result appreciatively.
 
"Two bells!" he announced to Lettice. "We're going to do ourselves well."
 
His prediction, however, only applied to himself, for Lettice ate even less than usual; an amount, he had once declared, absurdly incompatible with her splendid air of health.
 
She offered him no assistance in clearing up, but he showed a proper sense of his privilege, by refusing even to throw the lobster claws into the sea. Lettice smiled at the chaos of fragments he insisted on repacking.
 
"Bridget will have ideas of your economy when she opens that," she suggested.
 
"She'll guess perhaps that we lunched in Paradise," he said.
 
They walked to the limits of it when he had finished, and sat on the outermost spur of rock.
 
The ocean was like glass; yet the water pulsed to and fro past them between the long limestone ledges, as it rose and fell with the breath of the sleeping blue breast of the sea.
 
And the tender sounds of it never ceased. Soft thumps in the blind tunnels beneath them, a crystal kiss that whitened an edge of stone, the whisper of clear rillets that ran up and tinkled down again, finding no pool to hold them; and, under all, the brushing, backwards and forwards in the moving water, of the yellow tangle of weed.
 
Caragh remained but a short time in the seat he had chosen. Rising, he stood at the margin of the sea, shifting his footing now and then, to scan some fresh wonder of colour, and with his ears intent on the soft complexity of sound. He seemed entirely to have forgotten his companion's presence, and Lettice watched him with an interest which became annoyed.
 
"One would think you had never seen such a thing before," she said.
 
He turned at the sound of her words, but came more slowly to their meaning.
 
"Oh, one never has seen, or heard, anything before; it's always different," he replied, smiling. "Just listen to that little pool emptying; it runs up a whole octave, but such a queer scale! yet a minute ago I couldn't hear it! And the comic cadence of the water in that gully, it almost makes one laugh. How old Bach would have played with it. But you don't hear?"
 
"Not a note," she said with tight lips; "but I've no ear."
 
Caragh caught the tone of grievance. He smiled across at her.
 
"It's sheer vanity to say that," he tossed back; "but I'll admit if your ears were smaller no one could see them."
 
He stepped over the intervening ledges, and they picked their way side by side to the beach.
 
"But it is wonderful," he continued, "that there's a whole world round us that we listen to and look at for years and years, yet never either hear or see till some strange fortunate moment." He put his hand under her outstretched arm as her balance wavered upon a ridge. "Why, this may be Paradise after all, only we don't notice the angels."
 
His fingers closed on her elbow as she slipped upon a piece of weed.
 
"You shouldn't avow it, though you do ignore me," she said reproachfully.
 
"Ah," he sighed, as they stepped down upon the strand, "you do no justice to my plural. I wasn't thinking of the sort of paradise that may be made by one pair of wings. All the same," he went on reflectively, throwing himself upon the beach beside her, "it isn't as an angel that I've ever thought of you."
 
The tide was almost at its full, and the clear deep water with its thin crystal lip, which opened and shut upon the stones, was only a yard or two from Miss Nevern's feet.
 
Her little white shoes were thrust out straight before her, heels together, pointing to the sky, and she leaned forward looking over them across the bay.
 
At Caragh's words she turned her face towards him, with the vague depths of some conjecture in her eyes, as though disposed to ask him how, if not as an angel, he had ever thought of her. But she turned her eyes again, without speaking, to the topaz hills beyond the bay.
 
Maurice lay a moment looking at her silent profile, then, standing in front of her, he spread out the wide white skirt fan-wise on either side of her feet.
 
"Now you're perfectly symmetrical," he said, contemplating her from above.
 
She lifted her eyes to his from the distant hills with a smile.
 
"It would make a charming thing in marble," he continued; "almost Egyptian and yet so immensely modern. Only some fool of a critic would be certain to ask what it meant."
 
"And what would you say?"
 
He gave the statue a moment's further consideration.
 
"Well, that it wasn't meant for him, anyway," he replied, dropping down again beside her.
 
"Could you tell him what it meant for you?" she enquired, without moving.
 
"Not to save my life," he said at once; adding, as if to reassure himself, "but I know."
 
"You could tell me, perhaps?" she suggested presently.
 
"Heavens, no!" he exclaimed. "You least of all. You'd think me crazy."
 
"Oh, I think you that as it is," she admitted thoughtfully.
 
He laughed, but with his eyes still occupied with the beauty of her bent figure.
 
He filled his left hand absently with the little shells on which he lay, shaking them up and down on his open palm, till only a few were left between his fingers. As he dropped these into the other hand, his eye fell upon them.
 
"I say! what dear little things!" he exclaimed enthusiastically. "Why didn't you tell me about them?"
 
............