Breakfast was ready. Captain Lufflin, who, like most retired old salts, had a healthy stomach, and humoured it, crossed and uncrossed his stumpy little legs, and pulled his grey moustache complacently, when he caught the first sniff of the hot coffee and broiling beefsteak.

He had been down on the foggy beach (for the high winter tides were worth watching on that lonely coast), and was now quietly drying his feet before the crackling wood-fire in the dining-room grate; but even Ann (the clam digger's daughter, promoted to cook), as she bustled in and out, had seen the Captain was out of temper, as he waited, frowning portentously, and wagging his bald head now and then as if a wasp stung it.

Lufflin, who aboard ship would have risked a thousand lives on his own cool judgment, had been uneasy and irritable for two months back, ever since Mrs. Jacobus had written to him about buying this house for her.

"It was to be a Christmas gift from her to her husband," she wrote. " She wanted it, therefore, kept a secret from him. Any quiet corner along the coast which they could make into a home." Adding something about M. Jacobus "being fagged out with work, and needing rest," at which Lufflin shook his head. The Captain knew, that, bookworm and picturemaniac though he might be, Jacobus had managed to squander, in some unaccountable way, his own and his wife's fortune. So much of their history had got back to the fishingtown where she had lived when a child. People even hinted that they had been almost starving latterly in New York. However that might be, Old Lufflin knew that the sum she remitted to him was the last they had left; and beyond this, he had a shrewd suspicion that in the shipwreck the Jacobuses had made of life, something of more worth than money had been lost, and that this home she talked of was most probably a last effort to bury some shameful secret.

The Captain, in his disgust at the unknown bookworm, fretted under the whole affair. "It's not in my line," he would growl. "It's a cursed bore. Poor Charlotte! she used to swim like a frog in the inlet there, when she was only eleven. She's little heart for swimming now, it's likely!" And would begin his search with redoubled vigour,

This house, a grey stone cottage of five or six rooms, in the most solitary part of the leecoast, had been vacant for some time, and was to be sold cheap. Lufflin bought and furnished it in his own name; and then, as she directed, asked the Professor and his wife down to spend the Christmas holidays with him. He was anxious and awkward as a school-boy when they arrived the night before.

"It was too tough a job for you to set me, Charlotte," he grumbled. "How was I to choose a home for a man that lives, they say, by the sight of his eyes and the hearing of his ears? Water's water to me, and rocks rocks," trotting after her as she went through the house in silence, ending the survey with two or three sharp decisive nods and a quick, pleased little laugh.

"Satisfied? Yes, I am. Yes, I am. We've had a good many houses, Jerome and I; but this is home."

The Captain understood her.

In the morning, however, he felt all his doubts return. Mrs. Jacobus's quick, firm step sounded above, below him; presently she came in with a jug of yellow cream, and set it on the table, adjusting the dishes, putting a glass of holly in the middle, opening the window curtains to let the cold, grey, wintry light fall on the white cloth and pretty blue china service.

"Those oysters now?" said the Captain anxiously. "Ann's a poor cook."

"She's as clean as a Shaker, though. But I broiled them myself," laughing to herself to see his relieved face.

"They're all right, then, Charlotte?"

"Yes."

She would give her mind to the oysters, he knew. It had been her way to put a little of her brains and blood into all her jobs in life, finishing each with a self-satisfied little nod. No wonder that she was worn now that she was a middle-aged woman.

"She's lost something, Lotty has since I knew her," he thought, watching the light figure in its dark blue dress moving about; "but she's the right stuff for home use," with some vague idea in his old salt-water brain of delicate, incomplete faces suiting best with moonlight and country strolls, and of the sparkle of dinner-lights and brilliant eyes agreeing together, but that a face like Charlotte's was the one for a breakfast table. The shrewd,

Y

kindly eyes, the colour on her face, and the laugh came on you as fresh as a child's-if her hair was a bit grey.

She had gone to the bay-window that overlooked the stretch of coast on which the heavy winter tide was coming in, and grown silent watching it. The Captain called to her; he wanted nothing to put the breakfast back this morning. And he fancied that to a woman who had been a leader in the world of culture and refinement yonder this sky and loud foreboding surf might have some meaning of which he knew nothing.

"Nature's voices, eh?" coming to her side. Some expression that had held her face suddenly escaped it.

"I am watching for Jerome. Yonder he comes with your fisherman, by the inlet," pointing to two dark figures in the mist crossing the sands below.

The house stood on a ledge, facing the sea; ramparts of rock, grey and threatening in this light, running down on either side, and shutting out all outlook but that of the dull, obstinate stretch of sand on which the sea had beaten and fallen back for centuries, with the same baffled, melancholy cry. Behind the house were clumps of pines and cedars. Nature had done all she could in wringing out whatever green and lusty life was left in rocks and sand to make the place home-like and cheerful. Beside the trees, there was a patch of kitchengarden back of the house, a grape-vine or two on the walls, trailing moss hanging to its eaves, the delicate web-like moss that grows along this coast out of dead wood; even the beach rocks glowed into colours-dark browns, purples, and reds.

But for all these it needed summer and sunshine. On this, the day before Christmas, the house and the land about it were smothered in a cold mist; only the shivering sea beyond had voice or motion.

"It's a dull, uncanny place, Mrs. Jacobus," said Lufflin, anxiously. "It looks like a prison to me to-day. What if we've made a mistake?"

"We have made no mistake," calmly.

66

'Indoors," he persisted, "the house is cheerful enough. But it's a rough coast, and the oyster-dredgers and wrackers hint that the house ben't above highest water-mark. They're a wild pack, them wrackers. I doubt it's a gloomy home I've picked for M. Jacobus, after all his"

Something in her face silenced him. "You did [right, Uncle George," she answered, cheerfully.

But the pleasant eyes he had liked so much last night he noticed were turned to the sea now with a hard look, new to him, begotten both of great pain and obstinate endurance.

"Of course you know, Charlotte; of course. God knows I want to do what's for the best." He hesitated, then went on briskly, taking

walked you to sleep many's the night, being your father's chum, and living in his house till the day of his death. I'd like you to know I'm a true friend. If so be as you're in trouble, you must tell me. If this house is a sort of hiding, as I've thought once or twice, speak the word, and there's nobody shall get below Barnegat, to disturb it, or"

Mrs. Jacobus faced him suddenly-the nerves in her body seeming to stiffen, her half-shut eyes fixed on his. The Captain's quailed. "You mean Jerome?" in a low voice.

He did not answer. She waited a moment, and then turned again to the window, holding forcibly down whatever resistance his touch had roused in her.

“You mean well,” she said quietly after a pause. "But you do not know my husband. I was a fool to expect that; yet I did expect it," remembering bitterly how, when she brought her husband here, she had counted surely on a real justice for him from the single-minded old Captain, which shrewd, sensible men had not given.

"How could I know him? You talk like a woman, Lotty," stammered the Captain. "I never saw M. Jacobus till last night. It was a vague whisper, or rather an old man's whim, that there might be something gone which both you and he wished forgotten."

She had her face pressed against the pane, but Lufflin fancied that it lost colour, and that the delicate lips closed with the firmness of a steel spring.

"There was no crime," she said, in a moment or two.

The old man came close to her after awhile, and put his hand gently on her hair; streaked with grey as it was, she seemed nothing but a child to him still.

"You're growing like your mother, Lotty," he said.

After a long while she spoke again, but under her breath, as if half-talking to herself.

"We had a child once, Jerome and I," she said.

"I know," the Captain rejoined, quickly turning his eyes from her face, and, after waiting for her to go on, added, “Never but the one; I know."

"It was a boy. Little Tom."

There was a sudden choking gulp in the mother's throat; she had overrated her strength a little. The old man looked steadily out to sea, and took no notice.

"They never were apart, Jerome and the boy," she went on at last, firmly; "and when I would see them at work with their play-tools, or romping together I used to wonder which of the two had the most simple, affectionate nature, or knew less of the ways of the world."

Luffin said nothing to this defence. He was annoyed at himself for having vexed her; conscious and remorseful for any wrong he had done M. Jacobus, but with a stronger suspicion than before that he had galled some old wound in her memory. Whatever the secret might be,