with no one to come to his relief, the sailorman
stood his watch. About him the branches bent with the snow, the icicles
froze him into immobility, and in the tree-tops strange groanings filled
him with alarms. But undaunted, month after month, alert and smiling,
he waited the return of the beautiful lady and of the tall young man who
had devoured her with such beseeching, unhappy eyes.

Latimer found that to love a woman like Helen Page as he loved her was
the best thing that could come into his life. But to sit down and lament
over the fact that she did not love him did not, to use his favorite
expression, "tend toward efficiency." He removed from his sight the
three pictures of her he had cut from illustrated papers, and ceased to
write to her.

In his last letter he said: "I have told you how it is, and that is how
it is always going to be. There never has been, there never can be any
one but you. But my love is too precious, too sacred to be brought
out every week in a letter and dangled before your eyes like an
advertisement of a motor-car. It is too wonderful a thing to be
cheapened, to be subjected to slights and silence. If ever you should
want it, it is yours. It is here waiting. But you must tell me so. I
have done everything a man can do to make you understand. But you do not
want me or my love. And my love says to me: 'Don't send me there
again to have the door shut in my face. Keep me with you to be your
inspiration, to help you to live worthily.' And so it shall be."

When Helen read that letter she did not know what to do. She did not
know how to answer it. Her first impression was that suddenly she had
grown very old, and that some one had turned off the sun, and that in
consequence the world had naturally grown cold and dark. She could not
see why the two hundred and forty-nine expected her to keep on doing
exactly the same things she had been doing with delight for six months,
and indeed for the last six years. Why could they not see that no longer
was there any pleasure in them? She would have written and told Latimer
that she found she loved him very dearly if in her mind there had not
arisen a fearful doubt. Suppose his letter was not quite honest? He
said that he would always love her, but how could she now know that?
Why might not this letter be only his way of withdrawing from a position
which he wished to abandon, from which, perhaps, he was even glad to
escape? Were this true, and she wrote