"If you must go to Africa," she said, "I hope you will not run any needless risks."
"I will not. I promise it."
"We shall often think of you," she added, in a low voice.
"And I of you, be you very sure."
Her fingers were resting in his hand. He bent and pressed them to his lips, and--the next moment he was gone.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
AT THE LILACS
Nullington was a sleepy little town, standing a mile, or more, from Heron Dyke, and boasted of some seven or eight thousand inhabitants. The extension of the railway to Nullington was supposed to have made a considerable addition to its liveliness and bustle: but that could only be appreciated by those who remembered a still more sleepy state of affairs, when the nearest railway station was twenty miles away, and when the Mermaid coach seemed one of those institutions which must of necessity last for ever.
Nullington stood inland. Of late years a sort of suburb to the old town had sprung up with mushroom rapidity on the verge of the low sandy cliffs that overlooked the sea, to which the name of New Nullington had been given. Already New Nullington possessed terraces of lodging-houses, built to suit the requirements of visitors, and some good houses were springing up year by year. Several well-to-do families, who liked "the strong sweet air of the North Sea," had taken up their residence there en permanence.
It was a pleasant walk from New Nullington along the footpath by the edge of the cliff, with the wheat-fields on one hand and the sea on the other. When you reached the lighthouse, the cliff began to fall away till it became merged in great reaches of shifting sand, which stretched southward as far as the eye could reach. Here, at the junction of cliff and sand, was the lifeboat station, while a few hundred yards inland, and partly sheltered from the colder winds by the sloping shoulder of the cliff, stood the little hamlet of Easterby. A few fishermen's cottages, a few labourers' huts--and they were little better than huts--an alehouse or two, a quaint old church which a congregation of fifty people sufficed to fill, and a few better-class houses scattered here and there, made up the whole of Easterby.