t one of the boats a fisherman, dressed in oil-skins, was leaning.
He had a paint-brush in his hand, and he was gazing out ruefully over
the bay, which was lashed into white caps by the strong breeze. When he
saw Maggie, he pulled at his forelock and set to work vigorously with
his paint-brush on the stern of his boat, daubing with the black paint
over the name of the craft. As the fisherman obliterated the name,
Maggie noticed that his hand trembled and that he turned his head away
from her that she might not see his face.

"What are you doing, my good man?" she asked, coming near him, for she
saw that he was in distress.

"Painting and caulking my old boat, miss," answered the fisherman,
blotting out the last letters with a long smear of paint.

"But you are painting out the name?" said Maggie, inquiringly.

"I have a new name for the craft, miss," he answered, in a hoarse voice:
"the 'Lone Star'; and I am painting out the old name, the Mary Mallow,
which I gave her after my wife; but, saving your presence, miss, she
desarted me these six months ago; I was too rough and common for her, I
suppose."

He put his rough hand over his eyes. "It goes against my heart to paint
her name out; but, as things are now, the 'Lone Star' is better."

Maggie could not help smiling at the unconscious poetry of the poor
fellow and at the likeness between her lot and his.

"I am sorry for you, my man," she said, and she slipped a coin into his
hand. "Put in a gilt star on the stern with this. It will be a comfort
to you to have your boat smart." The man took the coin and looked at it
vacantly. Maggie left him and kept on her way over the beach, past the
boats and the drying nets, and the great heaps of seaweed and kelp, to
the headland which jutted out into the sea beyond the village. Once
there she seated herself in a deep recess of the cliff which commanded a
view of the bay.

"And now I am alone, entirely alone, and I cannot be disturbed," she
said to herself.

Down below her the breakers rolled in over the seaweed-covered rocks,
and dashed into a deep chasm in the rocks, cleft by the attrition of
ages, breaking with a dull sough upon the farthermost end of the cleft.

Maggie could see nothing from her perch but the sea, and the opposite
cliff upon which Ripon House stood. A few wheeling sea-gulls, and a
small fishing-boat, beating out of the harbor, were the only living
objects in the view. The waves, crest over crest, hur