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azure horizon, the stainless polished floor of the Pacific Ocean stretched out before their eyes. It was a wonderful blue aërial world; only the faintest cloud-shadows wavered over the pale blue depths; only a few rocky islets broke the intense delicious calm. A soft palpable haze, like the bloom of ripe grapes, or the dust on a butterfly’s velvet wing, vested the distant islets and the coast-line with a visionary beauty. The colour of the sea was indescribably pure and lovely, melting into the sky-line without a break. One or two ships in full sail seemed to hang on the blue margin of heaven, and the breakers gathered in long curving lines, and rolling inshore, broke unheard on the rocks below, so far above the beach was the garden plateau where they stood.

It was almost too beautiful to talk about, and they gazed on it in silence, as if it were some lovely evidence of the things that are unseen and eternal; while the evening sunshine lowered, and the clouds moved as in sleep, slowly, slowly, slowly, across the deep, and faded away in the pale blue distance.

“Come, we will have something to eat after all this splendour,” said Arthur at last. “I see our hostess is arranging a table at the other end of the terrace, and I think we shall rather astonish her when we once begin.”