Chapter VII: Part THREE: I (2)

All the evil in me was loosed by this adventure. I swore to myself
that I would be revenged upon those people and any and all of their
people, and that I would live if only to accomplish that. But
eighteen months in which I lost all track of the Hawkinses cooled
that purpose. I married, and Keturah Hawkins was half forgotten. Of
my marriage it is not necessary to say anything. It took place in San
Francisco and was forced upon me at the point of a pistol. My wife
died within a year. I left the sea and became a prospector when I was
not an idler. I was nearly 50 when a child was born. This is the boy
known as Guy Vanton. After his mother’s death, very shortly after,
I struck it rich. Concerning my money and the source of it I have
nothing to say; concerning the boy’s mother nothing except that we
were not married. I may not be his father, but I am the only father
he has known. All these things I have told him. I would save him,
if possible, from what has befallen me. You will see what that is
shortly.

After I became rich--so rich that I could not waste my substance in
a night, or a week, or a year; so old that caution was the stronger
impulse always and made me hoard what I had--after the death of Guy
Vanton’s mother I lived just outside San Francisco with the boy and
the memories of a vicious life. There is nothing like old age to
intensify the good or evil in a man. Here was I with my memories,
which all at once, in my loneliness, became vivid, alive, crawling. I
thought of Keturah Hawkins and writhed. I thought of her jewels and
a terrible greed filled me. I thought of that flogging on the _China
Castle_ and my shoulders twitched; of the impact of Captain Hawkins’s
fists and quivered, half raising a protective arm. I wrote again
to Richard Hand and learned that these two people were dead; that
their nephew had married and displeased Keturah Hawkins; that her
fortune had gone to her niece. From Richard Hand I was able to learn
something about these persons and to figure out a way I might strike
at them and hurt or crush them. How was I able to get this out of
him? Partly by threats to show him up as compounding with me to keep
his brother out of a lawful inheritance; partly with money. I have no
time for details and there are things that are better to go forever
unrecorded.

It was I, Jacob King, who hired a man to make love to and fascinate
John Smiley’s wife. It was an easy thing to do, with her husband
mostly absent on the beach. To avoid the townspeople’s eyes was
more difficult, but it was managed with secret meetings of one sort
or another. She was led to leave him, taking her baby girl with her;
eventually she was led to me. How much of this Richard Hand surmised
I don’t know or care. But he had no part in it beyond giving me facts
about the Smileys to go upon.

I subjected Mary Smiley to all the tortures I could devise. She
lived with me though she was John Smiley’s wife. She was a silly,
childish creature and she was absolutely at my mercy. I made her
life a hell for several years. In the meantime, her little girl was
growing--into a tiny image of Keturah Hawkins. It was that which
conquered me, or the settled wickedness within me. I, who had set out
to wreak remotely my revenge on Keturah Hawkins, was myself becoming
the victim of a living punishment. For here was Keturah Hawkins in
the house with me. Every physical characteristic was there in the
child later known as Mermaid Smiley, the daughter of John Smiley
and Mary Rogers Smiley, the grandniece of the woman I remembered.
The child had Keturah Hawkins’s hair, eyes, skin, and features;
even, in embryo, her manner. I could torture her silly and pitiable
mother and the child would enter the room, a living taunt to me. Here
she was, and she would outlive me; she would be flesh and blood,
wonderful glinting hair, flashing blue eyes, matchless white skin,
unconquerably alive and superb, unconquerably young and gay when I
was not merely a cruel and old and despicable man, but dust. She
would dance on my grave.

I stood it as long as I could and then something happened within me,
a mental overthrow comparable to the physical defeats I had suffered
because of Keturah Hawkins. Something in the continual presence of
that child rained blows upon me until I was numb in my mind, until
I couldn’t think or plan at all, until the torture I could inflict
on her mother was a meaningless thing; and there had always been a
terrible futility about it for the reason that I could not make my
revenge anywhere near complete and satisfactory. I could not, for
instance, communicate to John and Keturah Smiley the triumph of
vengeance that was mine. John Hawkins was not alive to witness it;
Keturah Hawkins----Was she alive, in the person of that child, to see
it? Perhaps, and perhaps she was alive in the person of that child to
thwart it. She would beat me down; dead or living she would best me.
A superstitious, or perhaps a holy, terror laid hold of me so that
I dared not lay hands on the little girl, or even say to her things
that might bring tears to childish eyes. I dared not, I tell you! And
besides, it would be laying hands on Keturah herself.

You see the situation? Do you see how the poison of evil had worked
in me all these years, how it had dominated me for a time, how
it had lain dormant, how it had cropped out hideously like some
unspeakable and inexterminable disease? Silently through the years
it had corrupted me, corrupting my mind even more than my body, more
insidiously and more surely, and with more deadly a result. And at
last from a small boat on San Francisco Bay--we had gone into the
city to live--John Smiley’s wife was drowned. I was left with the
child on my hands and with no embodiment for my fancied vengeance. I
think I went nearly insane then, if I was not insane already.

I determined to make what atonement I could. I took certain cowardly
precautions and prepared to send the child back to her father. There
is something supernatural in the manner in which that return was
accomplished. I did not learn of it for some years. I took the boy,
Guy, and went to Paris, taking a servant with me in the semblance of
my wife and his mother. She became an invalid abroad, but I have not
cast her off.

In Paris I came to see that my atonement must be as complete as I
could make it. So I came back to New York and made inquiries through
Richard Hand. I was then “Captain Vanton,” or “Buel Vanton” but I
wrote him as Jacob King. He replied; from what he told me--and I
paid him, of course--I was able to piece together the truth that was
hidden from him and from others. The next step was the appearance of
Captain Vanton in Blue Port.

The rest, externally, is known; what can never be known is the
suffering I have endured. It is all deserved and much more, no
doubt, but endurance is nearing an end. I am probably insane in some
peculiar fashion. I see nothing but jewels; jewels arranged as if in
the hair and on the bosom of an invisible woman. Then I see Keturah
Hawkins, a very young Keturah Hawkins, but Keturah Hawkins beyond
question, pass along the street--and she wears no jewels. I think her
aunt has them, and some day in my madness I shall break in and steal
them, just to handle them, these stones that touched her white skin
and were nested in that wine-dark hair. Pray God, I may never lay
hold of them or I shall go raving mad! The girl, this reincarnation
of the woman I once held in my arms, I have no further concern with.
If ever she comes to me to know her story I shall tell her. But she
is Keturah. She knows.

The boy, young Guy, I have kept close by me, and I have told him some
of this shameful story in order that, if he does indeed have any of
my blood in his veins, he may have, in knowledge of the truth, some
antidote to its poison. The girl will have money, and I will provide
for the boy.

The girl and boy are friends; something else may ripen of their
friendship. If he is my son and if, as may be, she loves him, or
comes to love him, will that be a final triumphant twist in my favour
against Keturah? Will that be the last word--my word--in this problem
of revenge? You see, you see how deeply it has poisoned me. Perhaps I
will anticipate the end.

The signature of “Jacob King” completed this narrative, obviously too incredible in its statements and too monomaniacal in its tone to have any bearing on the death of Captain Buel Vanton from a pistol wound, self-inflicted.

VI

“I can’t,” said the smooth-shaven young man--young but evidently not so very young, either. His pale face had dark circles under the strange-lighted eyes. His black, straight hair was not brushed. The wind which ruffled it brought no colour to his cheeks. His nostrils--he had rather a snub nose--twitched. At his sides his hands kept closing and unclosing, and he stood stiffly, like a scarecrow absurdly taken from a field and firmly rooted in this spot on the sand of the Great South Beach.

The young woman who faced him, with her glowing hair and her eyes and skin which seemed to reflect every atom of the downpouring sunlight, made no gesture, but met his denial with an affirmation. Two words pronounced in a low, vibrating voice:

“You can.”

They were ordinary young people of the twentieth century in appearance, the one perhaps more striking in beauty, the other certainly more distraught, than the average of their ages. But, except for the absence of any archaism from their speech, they might have been speakers in a drama as dark as “Hamlet.”

“You are thirty,” began the girl; “I am twenty-four. You have a fortune--well, $200,000 anyway. Enough for our needs. You have another inheritance, and I do not mean a blood inheritance. You are not likely to be the son of Jacob King.”

“But the son of Jacob King’s----”

“Don’t say it,” she interrupted, quietly. “She has not mattered these thirty years, why should she now? No, the inheritance I mean is not of blood, but of dread, shame, and repulsion. Isn’t it enough, Guy, that in his crazed lifetime he did everything that a man could do to make you as bad as himself? Are you going to let him rule you now that he is dead? Are you going to accept that inheritance? For you need not. While he lived he dominated your life, he made you share his thoughts, he made you an innocent accomplice in evil; you were an accessory after the fact of his wrong-doing. But now he has liberated you. When he shot himself dead it was an act of emancipation. He struck the shackles from you and set you free at the same instant that he went forward to meet his sentence and punishment.”

“I--I can’t,” repeated the man, hopelessly. “You forget the living tie, the woman there in the house, the one who is known as Mrs. Vanton.” The words seemed to hurt his throat.

The woman’s breast rose and fell, but there was tremendous control in her over herself, and she exerted some of it in her answer.

“There is only one thing to do,” she assured him. “It is to sever everything that joins you with him, dead or alive. Do this: put the inheritance money in a trust. The income will care for--for Mrs. Vanton, completely: medical attendance, nursing, everything. Give her the house, give her every dollar, but leave! You can take every precaution to see that she is properly cared for but you must get away. You must have a physical and a mental escape. You have got to renounce the past and everything in the present that threads you to the past. You have got to get out into a sunlit world, a world of normal men and women, of fighting and playing and loving, of shops and homes, of marriage and children, of discomforts and hardships, adventures and trifling worries and happiness. At thirty you must act, you who have been passive and acted upon. You have a life to live. Live it. Oh, Guy, live your own life!”

She turned away from him. Something in her voice galvanized him, communicated an electric thrill along the dead circuit of his nerves, startled him, shocked him from his inertia. He looked up quickly, took a step or two, and saw that she was crying. As if it were a reflex action he took two steps more and stood beside her, then put his arm timidly about her. For one instant she relaxed slightly, so that her weight fell upon the arm, then she was alive again and turned to him a smiling face with cheeks still wet.

“It doesn’t matter what you do,” she assured him. “Why don’t you do this? You aren’t in trim, physically; that’s plain. You’re in need of conditioning, some sort of outdoor life, something that will harden you. And you need company, companionship. Why not stay here on the beach this summer and then through next winter with my father at the Coast Guard station? He can’t take you on as a surfman, of course, for you’d have to pass an examination. Though you might do that, a surfman has to have had several years experience as a bayman, too. But you could be a sort of volunteer member of the crew. You wouldn’t make any money but you won’t need any money. You’ll have bad hours, but fewer than you suppose. You won’t even have the ordinary loneliness, for you can’t take a beach patrol and you’ll always be out with one of the other men. And there’s Tommy Lupton--he’s here. You and he can travel together; you’re good friends. And Uncle Ho. Aunt Keturah can’t persuade him to leave the beach permanently. She says,” Mermaid smiled at the recollection, “she says that marriage with him has made no difference, that she sees him as often as ever.

“You haven’t to look a long way ahead,” she continued. “You oughtn’t to. Those who look too far ahead see the reflection of the past. You must live, as nearly as possible, from day to day. Plan for a year and plan, in the circumstances, no farther. Keep to the beach. Keep to the men, especially Uncle Ho and Tommy. They have something they can share with you, something you need above everything else just now.”

So it was decided and so arranged. Mermaid, who was concerned over her aunt’s health, felt that to go to California might do Keturah Hand a world of good. It could be tried, anyway. She came over to the beach one morning to say good-bye to her father, to Hosea Hand, to the men generally, one or two of whom, particularly Joe Sayre, remembered her from her childhood among them. And to say good-bye to Guy Vanton.

He already looked better physically, she thought, noting the trace of colour in his face and the absence of the dark rings from under his eyes. Their gaze met as they said good-bye. His curious, fawn-like glance was fixed on the shining blue surfaces that hid such great deeps within her eyes, a wild creature of the shore looking with wonder on the unfathomable sea. He said:

“Good-bye. I shall see you every time the sun shines on the ocean. You--you must come back. Please do write to me.”

“I shall be back,” she answered, with calm warmth. Only the blue opacity of her eyes concealed the great tides moving within her. “I shall write. Work hard. Sand and sea and sun are great chemicals to act upon the mind. The beach here is so like a desert island. You must think of yourself as on a desert island, cut off by the sea of present living from the lands of past remembrance. And eventually, like Atlantis, those lands will sink beneath the sea.”

With a firm handclasp they parted.

VII

On the train travelling westward Mermaid and her aunt had some talk of events, recent and not so recent.

“But why did you take my jewels?” demanded Keturah.

“Because they worried you. They were like a piece of bone, a tiny fragment pressing on the brain,” responded the young woman. “I knew that if they disappeared in such a way as to make it seem that they had been stolen--and I suppose, strictly, they were stolen--the worrying would cease. What made you think of Captain Vanton as the thief?”

“Because it was impossible to think of any one else, I suppose,” said Mrs. Hand. “And while I never guessed that he was the man King, still he evidently knew more about King than any of us did; and King had known or seen Keturah Hawkins and knew of or had seen the stones. Any one might want to steal them who knew about them. And he did.”

Mermaid had a question in turn:

“I should have thought Uncle Ho would have recognized Captain Vanton as the Jacob King he had known in San Francisco.”

“Child, half a century had elapsed between his acquaintance with Jacob King and the appearance of Captain Vanton in Blue Port. Then, those sidewhiskers....”

“Dickie will come out next week,” Mermaid said, absently.

“Are you going to marry young Dick Hand?” Keturah inquired, with her natural abruptness.

“Aunt, you wouldn’t have me marry a man just because he asks me, would you?”

“Well, I hope you wouldn’t marry him without his asking you to.”

“I might ask him.”

“Dickie?”

“Oh, no--that is--I mean--Dickie has asked me, but I mean I might--sometime----” Mermaid seemed unnecessarily embarrassed. Her aunt looked at her intently; then, as if she thought it better to swerve the conversation slightly, remarked abruptly: “Well, old Richard Hand died a natural death at the end of his unnatural life, after all.”

“I don’t think you can call death from fear a natural death,” objected the younger woman.

“Fear! What was he afraid of?”

“He was partly senile, of course, but he could not be convinced that Captain Vanton was really dead. He heard more or less of Captain Vanton’s story. The coroner didn’t give it out, but things like that always get around, or some of them. When they told him that Captain Vanton was Jacob King, he had a stroke. Paralysis. After that he kept looking about him and saying: ‘The King is dead! Long live the King!’ And when they told him that Captain Vanton had been buried he cried out: ‘Nothing is ever buried. He’ll come to life again.’ Later he had delusions that he saw King or Vanton. Do you remember when Dad went to see him? He caught sight of Dad and shrieked: ‘Don’t kill me, John Smiley! I didn’t steal your daughter! Kill King! Only you can’t kill him!’”

Mermaid finished with a shudder.

Mrs. Hand asked: “How much of the whole story does young Dick know?”

“His father’s part in it pretty fully. The rest--about Guy and Mrs. Vanton and all--no more than the other Blue Port people. About all they know is that Mrs. Vanton wasn’t the Captain’s wife and that the Captain was a mad old man who made his boy’s life miserable and who had had something underhanded to do with Richard Hand.”

“I’ve always wondered what you told that man to make him tell you that you were John Smiley’s daughter,” Mrs. Hand remarked.

“Only what I guessed. He was ready to tell me,” said Mermaid. “I was really fighting for Guy. I offered your jewels to him as a ransom for Guy. It sounds ridiculous, but since I knew you thought he had taken them I knew you must think he coveted them, had some craving that they might satisfy. I was more or less in the dark; I went ahead by instinct.”

“It’s a wonder, since he shot himself right after you left the house, that you were not accused of murder,” said Keturah, grimly. “You might have shot him dead and walked away.”

“You forget Mrs. Vanton,” Mermaid reminded her. “She had come to the head of the stairs. She saw the door close after me. It was two or three minutes later before she heard the pistol shot.”

“She’s honest, it seems.”

“Yes, poor creature.”

“Mary,” asked Keturah Hand as she leaned forward while her niece adjusted the pillows behind her in the big Pullman chair, “when that man refused the jewels you told him that you would offer another ransom for Guy Vanton. What had you in mind?”

The younger woman was behind her aunt. Mrs. Hand twisted about suddenly to see her face. It was flushed, but Mermaid’s deep and brilliant eyes met her aunt’s unflinchingly.

“I would have married Guy,” she said, her voice vibrating slightly. “His father--that is, that man--talked about saving him. I would have matched my salvation of him against his--father’s. I would have fought for him against all the past evil that was dragging him down. Now his father is dead. He can--possibly--pull himself out alone, unaided. If not, I am ‘standing by.’ Oh, yes--I love him,” she finished, answering the interrogation that leaped from Keturah Hand’s eyes.

VIII

In the sunshine of California, in the cheerfulness of life in San Francisco, Keturah grew steadily better. Dick Hand executed a variety of projects, and only Mermaid remained unstirred and uninfluenced by her surroundings, by the change of air and scene. It is perhaps wrong to speak of her as “unstirred.” She was stirred and very deeply, but by no trifle of environment or of company. Down in her the great tides were swinging, moving resistlessly and in vast volume, imperceptible in their drift and direction on the surface. As was inevitable, Dick Hand again asked her to marry him and this time she gave him a final refusal. She did not put him off. She knew it would be useless. The current had set and was sweeping on through her. She could chart it, and she knew it would not shift. Something tremendous, something massive in her life would be required to deflect it.

“Why,” she asked herself, “should I pretend to myself any longer? I love Guy Vanton. I think I have always loved him. He is in peril and he needs my help. When he was caught in the surf did I wait to see if he could save himself? Not one instant! Why do I wait now? Why do I risk losing him, by letting him drown, forever? It isn’t right.”

She did up her hair in great coils, like thick cables of ship’s rope, and it seemed to her that each separate strand, so slender, so easily snapped, redoubled in its tensile power as it was gathered with the hundreds of others.

“Life,” she thought to herself, “is like that. We are tied to the past by a thousand filaments, every one of them slight, fragile, easily snapped, quickly broken. But they are all twisted together. They are like this coil of hair. They are like a thousand threads spun together, not to be snapped, not to be broken. A thousand things join Guy to the past. Some of the threads join the two of us.”

A fresh thought struck her.

“He can never escape wholly from his past. And I am almost the only thing or person in it that is pleasant or even halfway wholesome for him to remember.”

She recalled what she had told him, that he must no longer be passive but must act. Did not this counsel apply to herself? She knew she wanted him. She knew he wanted her. But however great his want of her he could not and would not call upon her to make what might be the sacrifice of a life--her life--to save his own. How could he, a man nearing middle age, really nameless, a child of disgrace and the son and heir of evil, lonely, sensitive, not unliked, but virtually friendless--how could he ask her to become his wife? He could ask of her nothing that she did not freely and of her own impulse offer and give him--friendship, sympathy, help, advice. The last item had an ironical ring in Mermaid’s consciousness. Advice to the drowning!

If he had the strength to save himself he had that strength, and that was all there was to it. For what was she waiting? To see him exercise it? But she loved him. It was not proof of his strength she required. What he had, what he lacked, was nothing--simply nothing. If he hadn’t it, she had strength enough for two. Suppose she failed? Suppose she knew she would fail? The old image persisted before her. If he were drowning and she knew that her effort to save him would not succeed, would she abandon him, just stand there watching, or await what would happen with averted eyes? Of course not. You had to make the effort no matter if it was absolutely foredoomed to failure. And this effort which confronted her was not necessarily foredoomed at all; at least, so far as she or any one else could see. They might shake their heads but they could not tell.

In her way, the best way she could manage, she put this to her aunt, who listened almost silently until the end and then said, suddenly and abruptly: “Of course, Mary, if you love him--why, that settles everything.”

Mermaid felt bound to insist on the logic leading to this conclusion.

“Nonsense!” exclaimed Mrs. Hand, irritably. “You can’t reason about such a thing. When two persons love each other it settles everything--and unsettles everything, too,” she added. “There’s only one thing to do, and there’s only one person to do it.”

“There’s really no reason why a woman shouldn’t propose to a man,” continued Keturah. “I’m no great respecter of conventions. You may remember the time when I used to wear a man’s old coat. Conventions were made for the man and not man for the conventions, except political conventions.” She was resorting, as was not unusual with her, to flippancy to cover emotion. “I don’t know but that I may be said to have proposed to your Uncle Hosea, when I got money that was rightfully his from his brother and put it in his hands, indirectly, as a lover sends a box of flowers to his sweetheart. Only I couldn’t have the florist, Lawyer Brown, put my card in the box,” she noted. “However, it wasn’t necessary; it seldom is. You always know who sent the flowers.

“I believe, though I don’t know, that Keturah Hawkins proposed to John Hawkins,” she went on. “John was a speechless sort of man all his life. I’m sure he never brought himself to utter any such words as: ‘Will you marry me?’ They would have choked him. I suspect that at the proper time Keturah began calmly to talk about plans for the house I live in, progressing by easy stages to such matters as the date of the wedding and the clothes he would need, down to his underwear, winter weight.

“They say the way to resume is to resume, but often the way to begin is to resume, too. Each night that John called, Keturah resumed the subject she had not discussed the night before; and so they were married and lived happily ever after.”

Mermaid, reduced to laughter by this narration, said: “Well, to resume what we were not talking about just now, I shall go East day after to-morrow if you are willing. I will bring Guy out here and then I can see you home. You ought not to travel alone.”

“Don’t think you are going away and leave me in this place 3,000 miles from Blue Port, missy!” exclaimed her aunt. “I won’t stay here. Besides, Dick Hand is cross as a catamount since you told him for the last time that----”

Mrs. Hand broke off the sentence as she might have bitten off a thread of unnecessary length. She looked at her niece and sighed.

“You are a fine woman, my dear,” she said. “Come here and kiss me. You don’t have to put your mind on it. Just a dutiful kiss will do.”

Mermaid kissed her with undutiful violence.

IX

They met, the two, on the beach, on a long sweep of the ocean shore where snipe were running at the edge of the lacy waves but where there was no other human being within sight or sound of them. They had met, you may say, before--at the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station, for instance, where Mermaid had kissed her father and shaken hands with everybody, including the one or two surviving honorary uncles of her childhood. They had sat them down at the long table over which Cap’n Smiley still presided, encouraging the art of conversation as one of those social amenities that marked the civilized man. They had eaten heartily of simple and appetizing fare, had joked, laughed, told stories. Mermaid had been delighted at the physical transformation in Guy. He was broader shouldered, or certainly seemed so, and was obviously heavier, “filled out,” as her father put it. The colour in his cheeks was a thing to wonder at; so was the calm of his eyes. They were still those wild-animal eyes, but the look in them was that of a creature at peace with the world and, for the rest, unafraid. He was, except for the fact of a somewhat wider education, one of them.

But that had not been a meeting. This was their meeting, here on the smooth and endless stretch of hard-packed sand at the ocean’s edge.

They stood side by side, not looking at each other but at the ocean, at the curling, magnificent breakers which the southeast wind was driving in. The sun shone, the air was magic. Bird cries reached them, a tiny treble to the bass of the water’s roar.

“Out of the ocean you came,” he said. “Will you slip away and return into it again some day, I wonder? Mermaid! The name is poetry and the story is romance. When you go back, you must look for me. I shall be a wreathed Triton, blowing upon a conch shell. I shall be among those who pull the sea god’s chariot while you will be among those who swim in his escort. And we shall be much together. Always.”

“You have done it!” she said, exultingly. “You have become a man, and yet you have not lost the child and the poet in you. You are really the Guy Vanton I first knew, only grown, matured, with the world before you.”

“I have it all yet to conquer,” he told her, half laughing.

“Your greatest conquest has been made.”

He reached for her hand, pressed it, and held it.

“Guy,” she said, suddenly, “will you marry me?”

She felt his hand tremble. The tremendous tide within her swept on, and in her ears there was a noise like singing. She felt his arm about her, and it was needed. She made out his voice, saying: “Mermaid, will you have me? Will you--have--me? Oh, if you will!”

It was a cry of entreaty, a prayer, a thanksgiving.

She suddenly slipped down onto the sand and quite ridiculously collapsed in a heap. And he was on the sand beside her, folding her to him, murmuring little words that were inaudible and precious. She felt his hair against her cheek and for an instant their strange eyes confronted each other. In his were brown and golden lights; hers were less brilliantly blue, as if the surface reflection were gone, and looking into them it would be possible, almost for the first time, to guess at the depths concealed by their mirror-like quality.

They sat there for a long time while the sun declined slowly through the heavens, a futile effort of the wheeling universe to measure by cycles and hours a moment of eternity.

X

The death of “Mrs. Vanton”--no one ever was heartless enough to call her anything else--left entirely to Guy the moderate fortune which had been Captain Vanton’s. And now he had a use for it.

Mermaid and her husband travelled about, crossing the Atlantic and visiting Paris, where Guy showed his wife some scenes of his boyhood. They rambled through little towns. And in these the streets seemed always to be crowded with youngsters at play.

Mermaid had hold of Guy’s arm. He felt her red-gold hair brush his cheek.

“Children!” he said, and fell silent. “We, too, were children once. I think we will always remain children, you and I. The spirit does not die, but the body must be renewed. It is ours to renew it.”

They walked on together, and everywhere the children looked up from the excitement and laughter of their games to glance at them interestedly or disinterestedly, curiously or with indifference, and here and there they caught a smile, fleeting and momentary, fashioned expressly for them, inviting them to share the instant’s joy. As they walked they drew closer together. They were no longer blissfully happy, moving in a thoughtless perfection of shared and reciprocated love. They were intelligently happy, perceptively, hopefully happy. To the delight of the moment and of each other was added the delight of anticipation. They walked on and looked down the long vista of the future.

Their love had now a meaning and a purpose for both of them that transcended the dear comradeship and pleasure of the present. It was still love, but it was not the same love; it had in it a sense of obligation, an instinct of fidelity, a passion of service, an element of devotion. In a little village church they knelt together, reverently, before the altar, and the same prayer was in both their hearts.