She had talked to me, on the
spot from which I now looked down, of her father, who was her last
surviving parent--had told me how fond of each other they had
been, and how sadly she missed him still when she entered certain
rooms in the house, and when she took up forgotten occupations and
amusements with which he had been associated. Was the view that I
had seen, while listening to those words, the view that I saw now,
standing on the hill-top by myself? I turned and left it--I wound
my way back again, over the moor, and round the sandhills, down to
the beach. There was the white rage of the surf, and the
multitudinous glory of the leaping waves--but where was the place
on which she had once drawn idle figures with her parasol in the
sand--the place where we had sat together, while she talked to me
about myself and my home, while she asked me a woman's minutely
observant questions about my mother and my sister, and innocently
wondered whether I should ever leave my lonely chambers and have a
wife and a house of my own? Wind and wave had long since smoothed
out the trace of her which she had left in those marks on the
sand, I looked over the wide monotony of the seaside prospect, and
the place in which we two had idled away the sunny hours was as
lost to me as if I had never known it, as strange to me as if I
stood already on a foreign shore.
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