cription of that teacher had reminded me strongly of my good Aunt
Sarah. The explanation that the dog had been the child's friend merely
because she had refused to be afraid, was so convincingly put that I
found myself in guilty accord with her point of view. In a dozen ways,
despite this single instance, she showed that her pity and tenderness
were very genuine and sensitive, and easily reached by any true appeal.

This going back to the beginning enabled me to meet, on the occasion of
his first appearance, the man who had exercised such a strong influence
upon her subsequent life. In this I was pleased, for it showed that
however imaginary may have been his aura of ideality, none the less it
had basis in something more substantial than a glimpse of a football
game. There was, too, an element touching and almost pathetic in this
earliest self-confessed love. He was when she first saw him, eighteen or
nineteen, and she half as old. This disparity in age had put a chasm
between them which it did not occur to her that the years would bridge.
He was just at that self-sufficient age, when he regarded himself as
very much a man and short-skirted, pigtailed females as very far beneath
his mature devotion. Yet, in his patronizing way, he had been decently
kind and had jeopardized his standing as a man-of-the-world by
impersonal courtesies to a little girl. His influence had accordingly
grown strong and permanent, though he had not known of its existence.
She had enviously watched him with girls a few years her senior and had
admired his frank, sportsmanlike attitude and freedom from callow
freshness--and his courage. She said quite frankly in the diary that she
did not suppose he had remembered her at all.

And so, as I lay sleepless and oppressed by presentiment of disaster, I
read from childhood to young womanhood her chronicle of ideals until,
under the soothing of the document, I at last fell into a doze.

CHAPTER VI

THE END OF THE "WASTREL"

When sleep came to me it was fitful with a thousand nightmare
impossibilities, I saw, in my dreams, the face of the stale sea and sky
translated into a broad human visage paralyzed and smiling unendingly in
that hideous grin which stamps the tortured teeth of the lockjaw victim.
Then the monster of the dream broke out of its fixity and with a shriek
of hurricanes aimed a terrific blow at the prow of the _Wastrel_. The
ship shivered, trembled and collapsed. With a stifled