tartling was it in
hue that it refused to blend, standing out against the duller tones of
the past with appalling distinctness; and never was it more
irreconcilable than when the familiar confines of the little fishing
hamlet by the sea were reached and those who struggled to harmonize it
saw it in contrast with this background of simplicity.

Each silently reconstructed Delight's life, now linking it with its
ancestry and its romantic beginnings. She had, then, sprung from
aristocratic stock; riches had been her right, and culture her
heritage. She had been the single flower of a passionate love, and the
hot-headed young father to whom she had been bequeathed when bereft of
the woman he had adored had taken her with him when he had sought the
sea's balm to assuage his sorrow. She was all that remained of that
tender, throbbing memory of his youth. Where he went she followed, all
unconscious of peril and with youth's God-given faith; and when the
great moment came and the supreme sacrifice was demanded, the man
voluntarily severed the bonds that bound them, leaving her to life
while he himself went forth into the Beyond. What must not that heroic
soul have suffered when he cast his child into the ocean's arms and
upon the mercies of an unknown future! What blind trust led him; what
unselfishness and courage lay in the choice he made! A smaller mind
would have followed the easier path and kept them united to the end,
happy in the thought that in their death they were not divided, and
that no years stretched ahead when she would be without his protection.
Might he not be performing a kinder act to let her go down into the sea
than to entrust her to the charity of strangers? He must have wrestled
with all these problems and temptations as he stood lashed to the mast
out there in the fateful storm.

Ah, his confidence in a fatherhood more omniscient than his own had not
been misplaced. Loving hands had borne his darling safely through the
waves to a home where, in an atmosphere of devotion, the beauty that
had been in her from the beginning had perfected in its maturity. Even
the homely surroundings of the environment into which she drifted could
not stifle her native fineness of soul. Bred up a fisherman's daughter
she had lived and moved among plain, kindly people, whom she had
learned to cherish and revere as if they were of her blood, and to whom
she had endeared herself to a corresponding degree.

And now