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