The Adventures of Harry Richmond. Volume 4. George Meredith

the princess said,

      'Is my English improved? You smiled at it once. I will ask you when I meet you next.'

      'It is my question,' I whispered to my own ears.

      She caught the words.

      'Why do you say—" It is my question"?'

      I was constrained to remind her of her old forms of English speech.

      'You remember that? Adieu,' she said.

      My father considerately left me to carry on my promenade alone. I crossed the ground she had traversed, noting every feature surrounding it, the curving wheel-track, the thin prickly sand-herbage, the wave- mounds, the sparse wet shells and pebbles, the gleaming flatness of the water, and the vast horizon-boundary of pale flat land level with shore, looking like a dead sister of the sea. By a careful examination of my watch and the sun's altitude, I was able to calculate what would, in all likelihood, have been his height above yonder waves when her chair was turned toward the city, at a point I reached in the track. But of the matter then simultaneously occupying my mind, to recover which was the second supreme task I proposed to myself-of what. I also was thinking upon the stroke of five o'clock, I could recollect nothing. I could not even recollect whether I happened to be looking on sun and waves when she must have had them full and glorious in her face.