Under a Charm, A Novel, Vol. I

The hot summer afternoon neared its close. The sun had already set, but the twilight glow still lingered in the western sky, and was mirrored in the sea, which, scarcely rippled by a zephyr's breath, caught the last splendors of the dying day. At some distance from the shore along which ran the great promenade of the fashionable watering-place of C----, usually thronged with visitors at this hour, stood a solitary country house, modest and unpretending, but distinguished from the large and splendid villas of the neighborhood by the beauty of its situation and its outlook over the sea to the horizon's verge.