her light, bright blue, short-sighted eyes gazed wistfully
towards the sound. Storms both in Nature and in human passions, when
distant enough, had always possessed a strange charm for her, the charm
of printed perils to minds congenitally timorous. She knew Sophy's
history and had read her poems when they first came out, with that same
sense of one enjoying a tempest in mid-ocean from the staunch deck of a
liner. In her case temperament was the liner--though she had always felt
in some inmost recess of her being, known only to herself and her
Creator, that, given the circumstances, she, too, might have been a
centre of tumult. And sometimes, gazing from the safe, close-curtained
windows of her present personality--the result of many careful,
cautiously repressed years--she wondered if the mistake makers, the
convention breakers, had not the best of it after all? Repentance must
be a wonderful emotion--that upheaving, ecstatic repentance that follows
big sins. So unconsciously and typically New England was Grace Loring,
that she could not think of splendid crime without following it up in
her mind by repentance even more gorgeous.

As Mrs. Loring sat there, with her son's letter on her lap, her sister,
Mrs. Charles Horton, came out of the house with a novel in her hand and
joined her.

"Still brooding over Morry's letter, Grace?" Mrs. Horton asked in a
brusque voice, sitting down beside her.

Mrs. Loring withdrew her vague, handsome eyes from the sea, and looked
quietly and directly at her sister.

"I'm not brooding, Eleanor," she said gently.

"Well, what then?" asked Mrs. Horton.

Mrs. Loring glanced at the letter through her _face-a-main_ as though
consulting it, then said in the same tranquil tone:

"I think I was rather admiring them both."

"What rubbish you talk sometimes, my dear Grace!" exclaimed her sister
explosively.

Mrs. Horton was short, brune, and rather plump. She had small,
chestnut-brown eyes, and rough, strong, crinkly dark hair. She was in
every way the opposite of her tall, distinguished, rather hushed sister.
Her manner of thinking and speaking was blunt and straightforward. Mrs.
Horton had no half-tones--she was like some effective national flag,
all clearly defined blocks of frank, crude colour.

"Are you going to write and remonstrate with that young fool, or are you
going to sit by and see him smash his life like crockery?" she said
abruptly.

Charles Horton had been a Californi