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158 ketful of clams, before the rising tide that slowly drove him shoreward, his eye caught the flutter of something pink at the edge of the land near the house. Looking closer, he saw—with a touch of surprise, for the place was almost never frequented—that it was a woman who stood there at the foot of the bank. She was looking out toward him, but as he straightened up she stooped and began plucking busily among the beach-grass. Without much further thought, he fell to digging once more; yet as often as he looked up, there she was still, and when finally the tide made him give over the day's work and turn homeward, he found her standing in the nook formed by the two projecting banks between which the path from the house came scrambling down to the beach.

Into this nook the sun beat fiercely. The woman had turned her back, and, with one foot on a rock, was tying her shoe. Her pink calico dress, bright against the tawny gravel and parched grass of the bank, clung about her in the wind as close as if it had been wet. She had firm shoulders,—rather broad for