Moths by Ouida — page 27: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

MOTHS. 93 waters from the east with the smoke of the first steamer from Havre towering gray and dark against the radiant rose of the sky, Vere had left Trouville, and its sleeping beauties and yawn ing dandies in their beds far behind her, and was nearly a third of the way to Villerville. She did not know anything at all about Lecamus fils, Jules David Challamel and Figaro, with his cabin, who had made Villerville famous, but she went onward because the sea was blue, the sand was yellow, the air was sweet and wholesome, and the solitude was complete. Hier spirits rose; light and air and liberty of movement were necessary to her, for in the old woods and on the rough moors of Bulmer her grandmother had let her roam as she chose, on | — footor on her pony. It had been a stern rule in other things, but as regarded air and exercise she enjoyed the most perfect freedom. ‘‘Are you tired, Keziah?’ she cried at last, noticing that the patient waiting-woman lagged behind. The stout Northumbrian admitted that she was. She had never been so in her life before; but that frightful sea-journey from Southampton had left her stomach ‘‘ orkard.”’ Vere was touched to compunction. ‘You poor creature! and I brought you out without your breakfast, and we have walked—oh, ever so many miles,” she said, in poignant self-reproach. ‘‘ Keziah, look here; there is,a nice smooth stone. Sit down on it and rest, and I will run about. Yes; do not make any objection; sit down.” | Keziah, who adored her very shadow as it fell on sward or sand, demurred faintly, but the flesh was weak, and the good woman dropped down on the stone with a heavy thud, as of a sack falling to earth, and sat there in plaid shaw] and home- — spun gown, with her hands on her knees, the homely sober figure that had seemed to Lady Dolly to have come out of the ark like the indigo bathing-dress. Vere left her on that madreporic throne, and strayed onward herself along by the edge of the sea. On one side of her was a dark bastion of rock that above, out of sight, bore green pastures and golden corn-fields; on the other wasthe Channel, placid, sunny, very unlike the surging, turbulent, gigantic waves of her old home. | “ ‘Can you ever be rough? Can you ever look like salt water? she said with a little contempt to it, not knowing anything about the appalling chopping seas and formidable swell of the Channel which the boldest mariners detest more than all the grand furies of Baltic or Atlantic. But it was bright-blue water fretted with little curls of foam, and the low waves rolled up lazily, and lapped the sand -at her feet; and she felt happy and playful, as was natural to her age; and that she was quite alone mattered nothing to her, for she had never had any young companions, and never played except with the dogs. She wandered about, and ran here and there, and found some gandpipers’ empty nests, and gathered some gorse and stuck it In the ribbon of her old sailor’s hat, and was gay and careless, and - gang little soft, low songs to herself, as the swallows sing when they sit on the roof in mid-summer, She had taken off her hat; IS ten comicbooks:coi >