Clasping her hands behind her head, Damaris lay back, the warm sand all around her, giving beneath her weight, fitted itself into the curves of her body and limbs--only it visible and the soft blue of the sky above.

For a little while she rested open-eyed in the bright silent stillness, and then, unknowing of the exact moment of surrender, she stretched with a fluttering sigh, turned on her side and dreamlessly slept.
And, while she thus slept, two events took place eminently germane to the further unfolding of this history .-- The weather changed, and the local degenerate, Abram Sclanders' half-idiot son--the poor "lippity-lop" who, according to Jennifer, had far better been "put away quiet-like at birth"-- committed theft.
Of the first event, Damaris gradually became sensible, before her actual awakening.

She grew restless, her bed of sand seeming robbed of comfort, bleak and uneasy, so that she started up, presently, into a sitting position, rubbing her eyes with her fists baby-fashion, unable for the minute to imagine how or why she came to be lying like this out on the Bar, hatless, shoe and stockingless.

Looking about her, still in questioning bewilderment, she observed that in the south-west a great bank of cloud had risen.

It blotted out the sun, deadening all colour.
The opaline haze, turned to a dull falling mist, closed down and in, covering the sand-hills and the dark mass of Stone Horse Head and even blurring the long straight lines of the sandbank and nearer shingle.