It is a place of charm if you are willing to do most of the work yourself with the aid of a daily help.
It is certainly rather like a band-box with the lid on, and the ocean at high tide is only prevented by the harbour wall from invading your front garden, which is the size of a handkerchief.
But if you sit at the window you can feel the spray on your face, and if you lie a-bed the tang of the air sweeping across the Atlantic will get you out at the double; and the smell of the pines, and the hum of the bees in summer, and the rush of the storm, and the crash of the waves in winter, are of God's own fashioning.
What with shopping expeditions to that crime in brick and mortar called
Ilfracombe, visits here and visits there, croquet, bridge, and picnics,
the summer and early autumn months had not dragged unduly for Susan
Hetth.
But when the last visitor had gone, and the first real storm had broken a window, then she had sunk like a lump of lead in a bucket of cold water out of which she refused to be lifted.
Leonie was youth incarnate, causing even the courteous folk of Devon to turn and stare as she swung past with a cheery greeting in a skirt and hob-nailed boots ending at her knees.
For the first month, as one always does in Devon, she had walked herself to the verge of scragginess, then had gradually put on weight, as is the correct method. Her whistle could be heard in the woods and fields, and on the beach from Lee to Hartland way; all the country folk loved her, and scolded her for the risks she took in swimming, and she seemingly had no care in the world.
But the great heat of summer, the shriek of the wind, and the scream of the birds in autumn would bring a little pucker between her brows; the storm would drive her spirits up to breaking point, the calm would leave her eyes full of trouble; in the woods she would stop and turn to listen, then frown and trudge along between the trees.
She was not at rest, for an unconfessed fear, a spook without name or shape, was plucking at her will-power and her heart, a phantom of which she would rather have died than have said one word.
So she stood twisting the blind cord and watching the rocks as they gradually disappeared under the swirling waters.