grand against the mast. It was life, it was death. The great sea was round us. It was the voyage for ever and ever.”
The ancient fairy-tale fell roundly and harmoniously upon Katharine’s ears. Yes, there was the enormous space of the sea; there were the three green lights upon the steamer; the cloaked figures climbed up on deck. And so, voyaging over the green and purple waters, past the cliffs and the sandy lagoons and through pools crowded with the masts of ships and the steeples of churches—here they were. The river seemed to have brought them and deposited them here at this precise point. She looked admiringly at her mother, that ancient voyager.
“Who knows,” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, continuing her reveries, “where we are bound for, or why, or who has sent us, or what we shall find—who knows anything, except that love is our faith—love———” she crooned, and the soft sound beating through the dim words was heard by her daughter as the breaking of waves solemnly in order upon the vast shore that she gazed upon. She would have been content for her mother to repeat that word almost indefinitely—a soothing word when uttered by another, a riveting together of the shattered fragments of the world. But Mrs. Hilbery, instead of repeating the word love, said pleadingly:
“And you won’t think those ugly thoughts again, will you, Katharine?” at which words the ship which Katharine had been considering seemed to put into harbour an have done with its seafaring. Yet she was in great need if not exactly of sympathy, of some form of advice, or at least, of the opportunity of setting forth her problem before a third person so as to renew them in her own eyes.
“But then,” she said, ignoring the difficult problem of ugliness, “you knew you were in love; but we're different. It seems,” she continued, frowning a little as she tried to fix the difficult feeling, “as if something came
