ught--why I cannot tell--that as much as this man brings
to me in rank and gifts he may take out of me in tears.'

'Berta!'

'But there's no reason in it--not any; for not in a single matter does
what has been supply us with any certain ground for knowing what will be
in the world. I have seen marriages where happiness might have been said
to be ensured, and they have been all sadness afterwards; and I have seen
those in which the prospect was black as night, and they have led on to a
time of sweetness and comfort. And I have seen marriages neither joyful
nor sorry, that have become either as accident forced them to become, the
persons having no voice in it at all. Well, then, why should I be afraid
to make a plunge when chance is as trustworthy as calculation?'

'If you don't like him well enough, don't have him, Berta. There's time
enough to put it off even now.'

'O no. I would not upset a well-considered course on the haste of an
impulse. Our will should withstand our misgivings. Now let us see if
all has been packed, and then we'll sing.'

That evening, while the wind was wheeling round and round the dwelling,
and the calm eye of the lighthouse afar was the single speck perceptible
of the outside world from the door of Ethelberta's temporary home, the
music of songs mingled with the stroke of the wind across the iron
railings, and was swept on in the general tide of the gale, and the noise
of the rolling sea, till not the echo of a tone remained.

An hour before this singing, an old gentleman might have been seen to
alight from a little one-horse brougham, and enter the door of Knollsea
parsonage. He was bent upon obtaining an entrance to the vicar's study
without giving his name.

But it happened that the vicar's wife was sitting in the front room,
making a pillow-case for the children's bed out of an old surplice which
had been excommunicated the previous Easter; she heard the newcomer's
voice through the partition, started, and went quickly to her husband,
who was where he ought to have been, in his study. At her entry he
looked up with an abstracted gaze, having been lost in meditation over a
little schooner which he was attempting to rig for their youngest boy. At
a word from his wife on the suspected name of the visitor, he resumed his
earlier occupation of inserting a few strong sentences, full of the
observation of maturer life, between the lines of a sermon written during
his first years o