ad of the contrary. And he was
married. His "only and beloved daughter?" Oh! how beloved she could
well understand. Married, and a father; and his child was dead.

Many would think it strange (it would be in most women, but it was not in
this woman) that the torrent of tears which burst forth, after her first
few minutes of dry-eyed anguish, was less for herself, because he was
married and he had lost him, than for him, because he had had a child and
lost it--he who was so tender of heart, so fond of children. The thought
of his grief brought such a consecration with it, that her grief--the
grief most women might be expected to feel on reading suddenly in a
newspaper that the man they loved was married to another--did not come.
At least not at once. It did not burst upon her, as sorrow does
sometimes, like a wild beast out of a jungle, slaying and devouring. She
was not slain, not even stunned. After a few minutes it seemed to her as
if it had happened long ago--as if she had always known it must happen,
and was not astonished.

His "only and beloved daughter!" The words sung themselves in and out of
her brain, to the murmur of the sea. How he must have loved the child!
She could almost see him with the little one in his arms, or watching
over her bed, or standing beside her small coffin. Three years and a
half old! Then he must have been married a good while--long and long
after she had gone on thinking of him as no righteous woman ever can go
on thinking of another woman's husband.

One burning blush, one shiver from head to foot, one cry of piteous
despair, which nobody heard but God--and she was not afraid of His
hearing--and the struggle was over. She saw Robert Roy, with his child
in his arms with his wife by his side, the same and yet a totally
different man.

She, too, when she rose up, and tried to walk, tried to feel that it was
the same sea, the same shore, the same earth and sky, was a totally
different woman. Something was lost, something never to be retrieved on
this side the grave, but also something was found.

"He is alive," she said to herself, with the same strange joy; for now
she knew where he was, and what had happened to him. The silence of all
these years was broken, the dead had come to life again, and the lost, in
a sense, was found.

Fortune Williams rose up and walked, in more senses than one; went round
to fetch her little girls, as she had promised, from that newly open