There was as yet no monument erected over the grave of the Reverend Peter Trevisa, sometime rector of St. Enodoc. The mound had been turfed over and bound down with withes. The loving hands of his daughter had planted some of the old favorite flowers from the long walk at the rectory above where he lay, but they had not as yet taken to the soil, the sand ill agreed with them, and the season of the year when their translation had taken place dissatisfied them, and they looked forlorn, drooping, and doubted whether they would make the struggle to live.
Below the church lay the mouths of the Camel, blue between sand-hills, with the Doom Bar, a long and treacherous band of shifting sands in the midst.
On reaching the graveyard Judith signed to Captain Coppinger to seat himself on a flat tombstone on the south side of her father’s grave, and she herself leaned against the headstone that marked her mother’s tomb.
“I think we should come to a thorough understanding,” she said, with composure, “that you may not expect of me what I cannot give, and know the reason why I give you anything. You call me Goldfish. Why?”
“Because of your golden hair.”
“No—that was not what sprung the idea in your brain, it was something I said to you, that you and I stood to each other in the relation of bird of prey to fish, belonging to distinct modes of life and manner of thinking, and that we could never be to one another in any other relation than that, the falcon and his prey, the flame and its fuel, the wreckers and the wrecked.”
Coppinger started up and became red as blood.
“These are strange words,” he said.
“It is the same that I said before.”
“Then why have you given yourself to me?”