and soon after she descended on the other side, where she remounted the
ass, and ambled homeward as she had come, in no bright mood. What,
seeing the precariousness of her state, was the day's triumph worth after
all, unless, before her beauty abated, she could ensure her position
against the attacks of chance?

'To be thus is nothing;
But to be safely thus.'

--she said it more than once on her journey that day.

On entering the sitting-room of their cot up the hill she found it empty,
and from a change perceptible in the position of small articles of
furniture, something unusual seemed to have taken place in her absence.
The dwelling being of that sort in which whatever goes on in one room is
audible through all the rest, Picotee, who was upstairs, heard the
arrival and came down. Picotee's face was rosed over with the brilliance
of some excitement. 'What do you think I have to tell you, Berta?' she
said.

'I have no idea,' said her sister. 'Surely,' she added, her face
intensifying to a wan sadness, 'Mr. Julian has not been here?'

'Yes,' said Picotee. 'And we went down to the sands--he, and Myrtle, and
Georgina, and Emmeline, and I--and Cornelia came down when she had put
away the dinner. And then we dug wriggles out of the sand with Myrtle's
spade: we got such a lot, and had such fun; they are in a dish in the
kitchen. Mr. Julian came to see you; but at last he could wait no
longer, and when I told him you were at the meeting in the castle ruins
he said he would try to find you there on his way home, if he could get