ng, awful pulsations. Jacobus and his wife looked on anxiously.

"These are peculiar features of a storm," he said, "if they forebode a
storm. The tide should be at its lowest ebb now. I will go and consult
our friend George. Come down! come down!"

As he hurried out of the door, however, he stopped, and put his hand on
her shoulder with a deprecating smile.

"I ought not to let those old thoughts strike the life out of the day
for me, ought I?"

"No, Jerome, no!" She caught his hand and kissed it as a mother might a
child's.

"I had almost ceased to make holiday," he added, gravely, putting his
foot up, retying the leather strings of his heavy shoes, and looking
down on his fisherman's rig with secret complacency.

"Shall we go down? There are foreboding signs in the sea, that I would
wish to study."

* * * * *

Late in the afternoon of that day, Captain Lufflin, coming up the rocks
from the beach, (for he had spent the day measuring the advancing
tide,) saw a queer-shaped cart or van drive up to the side door, and a
woman with divers bundles alight and go in. About an hour after, Madame
Jacobus came out to him, a woollen shawl over her head, and stood beside
the garden-fence with him, pulling the heads off the dead
hollyhock-stalks as she talked.

"I've a story to tell you," she said, her voice thick at first, and her
face hot.

"Eh? About yourself, Charlotte?" The Captain's small eyes kindled with
curiosity, and he pushed a log for her to sit down. "Go on, my dear."

"About ourselves,--M. Jacobus and me,"--with another pause.

"I perceived," said her father's friend, preparing for the confession of
some imprudence, "that your married life has been peculiar: modelled
after the ideas of young people, I suppose."

"I do not know," she said, absently. She balanced herself more
comfortably against the fence, and went on with her story with a quiet
unconsciousness that balked Lufflin's intention of censure.

"We have been poor in the two or three years just past," she
said,--"wanted enough to satisfy even his favorite Saint-Simon's theory.
My husband is no"----

"Financier?" gently suggested the Captain.

"No. He could beard the world in defence of an idea; but for bread and
butter, ah-h! I'm rougher! I ought to have been the man for that! About
a year ago he was offered a chance to go with a geological party to
Brazil. I was glad of that. The air and sights of our close c