`` Good-bye , '' said Joan steadily . She gave him her cold hand and looked calmly into his face without quailing . She had loved him with all her heart , but now a fatal scorn of him was already mingling with her love . He was what they said he was , a scamp without principle or honour . Paul whistled himself out of the Shelley lane and over the hill . Then he flung himself down under the spruces , crushed his face into the spicy frosted ferns , and had his black hour alone . But when Captain Alec 's schooner sailed out of the harbour the next day , Paul King was on board of her , the wildest and most hilarious of a wild and hilarious crew . Prospect people nodded their satisfaction . `` Good riddance , '' they said . `` Paul King is black to the core . He never did a decent thing in his life . '' A Soul That Was Not at Home There was a very fine sunset on the night Paul and Miss Trevor first met , and she had lingered on the headland beyond Noel 's Cove to delight in it . The west was splendid in daffodil and rose ; away to the north there was a mackerel sky of little fiery golden clouds ; and across the water straight from Miss Trevor 's feet ran a sparkling path of light to the sun , whose rim had just touched the throbbing edge of the purple sea . Off to the left were softly swelling violet hills and beyond the sandshore , where little waves were crisping and silvering , there was a harbour where scores of slender masts were nodding against the gracious horizon . Miss Trevor sighed with sheer happiness in all the wonderful , fleeting , elusive loveliness of sky and sea . Then she turned to look back at Noel 's Cove , dim and shadowy in the gloom of the tall headlands , and she saw Paul . It did not occur to her that he could be a shore boy -- she knew the shore type too well . She thought his coming mysterious , for she was sure he had not come along the sand , and the tide was too high for him to have come past the other headland . Yet there he was , sitting on a red sandstone boulder , with his bare , bronzed , shapely little legs crossed in front of him and his hands clasped around his knee . He was not looking at Miss Trevor but at the sunset -- or , rather , it seemed as if he were looking through the sunset to still grander and more radiant splendours beyond , of which the things seen were only the pale reflections , not worthy of attention from those who had the gift of further sight .
Miss XXXXX looked him over carefully with eyes that had seen a good many people in many parts of the world for more years than she found it altogether pleasant to acknowledge , and she concluded that he was quite the handsomest lad she had ever seen .
Cove King Noel Trevor daffodil harbour hour left sandstone spruces