w less speculative, detected the smudge against
the concrete walls. She took down a pair of glasses from the wall. It
was the towboat leaving the wharf. The glasses took the place of her
sewing, and they were still to her eyes when a sharp "Auntie!" came to
her ears. "Tention, auntie! Colors!" warned the voice. Lowering the
glasses, Marie came obediently to attention.

The sun was cutting the edge of the sea. The last level light lay on the
long, slow, swelling waters like a rolling, flaming carpet, and in that
flaming path the gray war-ships bobbed to anchor; and on the
quarter-deck of every ship a red-coated band was drawn up, and from the
jack-staff of every ship an American ensign was slowly dropping down.
The boy stood with his back to her, but Marie knew how his heart was
thumping, and she knew the light that would be on his face.

"O say! can you see--" came the swelling notes over the gently heaving
bay. Marie could feel that young Greg was ready to burst; but she could
not detect a move, not a quiver, out of him until the last note of the
last bugle had ceased to re-echo. Then he saluted reverently, executed
an about-face, and called out excitedly: "Auntie, auntie, there's papa
now! Look!"

Marie pretended to see for the first time the towboat which, a hundred
yards or so down the beach, was making a landing. "Sure enough, Greg!"

"And somebody else!"

"No; is there?"

"Why, don't you see--godfather, auntie! O papa! Godfather!" He was off.

When he returned he was clinging on the one hand to a tall, brown,
lean-cheeked, and rather slender man of thirty four or five, in dusty
corduroy coat and trousers, mud-caked shoes and leggings, khaki shirt,
and a hard-looking, low-blocked Panama hat; and on the other hand to a
man also sun-tanned, but less tall and not so lean--a muscular, active
man who may have lived the thirty years which Necker ascribed to him,
but who surely did not look it now. At sight of Marie Welkie stepping
down from the screened veranda he bounded like sixteen years across the
beach. "Marie Welkie--at last!"

"Andie Balfe!" She took his hands within hers and drew them up in front
of her bosom. The smile which Necker had so wanted to see again was
there now, and now not to vanish in a moment. Balfe brushed her finger
tips with his lips.

"How far this time, Andie?"

"From half the world around, Marie."

"And are you glad?"

"And I would come it twice again to see your dear eyes smil