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The desert, which had lain vast, dun-colored and unbroken before their eyes, had vanished; instead, a sapphire sea sparkled in the sunshine, its white-capped waves breaking upon the beach. Upon one side of it spread a city with white domes and fairy towers, and palm trees uplifting their graceful fronds among them. Hanson rubbed his eyes and looked again.
She dozed off again presently, and it seemed scarcely five minutes before she looked up to see a gentle smiling face of a white-capped nurse bending over her. "It is nearly six o'clock, my dear the time you told me. I came to see about breakfast." Mabel drew a long breath. Then she sat up suddenly, throwing back the sheet.
Yet the meeting-house on the hill was strangely, strongly representative of the frank, honest, unpretentious people who worshipped there, and after the first wave of surprise a feeling of interest and reverence held her. It was a unique sight for the city girl. The rows of white-capped women were separated from the rows of bearded men by a low partition built midway down the body of the church.
They were merely the prelude to a furious downpour which descended in silvery sheets, and fairly overflowed the discouraged landscape. A strong wind rose, lashing the leaden expanse of sea into a white-capped fury quite foreign to its hitherto deceitfully dimpled aspect. "It's a horrible day," conceded Elfreda Briggs gloomily. "We can't do any of the things we've planned.
Away to the north-west is Sandsend Ness, a bold headland full of purple and blue shadows, and straight out to sea, across the white-capped waves, are two tramp steamers, making, no doubt, for South Shields or some port where a cargo of coal can be picked up. They are plunging heavily, and every moment their bows seem to go down too far to recover.
But there was one of the white-capped maids coming across the lawn, with the summons to go in to luncheon, which was to be served at an earlier hour than usual. And after that, no one had more than a moment in which to think, for at three o'clock the garden party was to open, and the fair to be in full progress.
"There is nothing left of the Rosabel," said Leopold, as he gazed down upon the white-capped billows which lashed the jagged rocks below. "She went to pieces like an egg-shell." "Never mind the boat, Leopold. I am so thankful that our lives were spared," replied Rosabel. "O, I don't care for the boat. I only thank God that you were saved. I thought we should both be dashed in pieces on the rocks."
White-capped women were everywhere to be seen sweeping the cobbled streets with their peculiarly fragile-looking brooms. It was so early by the actual time, however, that it seemed wise to go straight to the hotel and to postpone the commencement of sight-seeing until a more rational hour.
White-capped, rosy-checked, bare-armed Tine had rung that bell for this group of painters for two years past ever since Mynheer Boudier of the Bellevue over the way, who once claimed her services, had reproved Johann, the porter, for blocking up with the hotel trunks that part of the sidewalk over which the steamboat captain slid his gangplank.
The policeman shambled off to find consolation among the white-capped nurses, and the student, looking at his watch, stood up yawning. Then catching sight of Hastings, he smiled and bowed. Hastings walked over to the marble, laughing. "Why, Clifford," he said, "I didn't recognize you." "It's my moustache," sighed the other. "I sacrificed it to humour a whim of of a friend.
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