settle for the rest of his days and travel the
sea no more.

"Now _he_ will come," thought Rachel. "Wherever he is, he will learn
that there is no longer anything to fear, and he will return."

And she waited with as firm a hope that the winds would carry the
word as Noah waited for the settling of the waters after the dove had
found the dry land.

But time went on and Stephen did not appear, and at length under the
turmoil of a heart that fought with itself, Rachel's health began to
sink.

Then Patricksen returned. He had a message for her. He knew where her
husband was. Stephen Orry was on the little Island of Man, far away
south, in the Irish Sea. He had married again, and he had another
child. His wife was dead, but his son was living.

Rachel in her weakness went to bed and rose from it no more. The
broad dazzle of the sun that had been so soon to rise on her wasted
life was shot over with an inky pall of cloud. Not for her was to be
the voyage to England. Her boy must go alone.

It was the winter season in that stern land of the north, when night
and day so closely commingle that the darkness seems never to lift.
And in the silence of that long night Rachel lay in her little hut,
sinking rapidly and much alone. Jason came to her from time to time,
in his great sea stockings and big gloves and with the odor of
the brine in his long red hair. By her bedside he would stand
half-an-hour in silence, with eyes full of wonderment; for life like
that of an untamed colt was in his own warm limbs, and death was very
strange to him. A sudden hemorrhage brought the end, and one day
darker than the rest, when Jason hastened home from the boats, the
pain and panting of death were there before him. His mother's pallid
face lay on her arm, her great dark eyes were glazed already, she was
breathing hard and every breath was a spasm. Jason ran for the
priest--the same that had named him in his baptism. The good old man
came hobbling along, book in hand, and seeing how life flickered he
would have sent for the Governor, but Rachel forbade him. He read to
her, he sang for her in his crazy cracked voice, he shrived her, and
then all being over, as far as human efforts could avail, he sat
himself down on a chest, spread his print handkerchief over his knee,
took out his snuffbox and waited.

Jason stood with his back to the glow of the peat fire, and his hard
set face in the gloom. Never a word came from him, never a sign,
n