d better to be borne, in the thick of a long winter's storm they
brought home her father, the old fisherman, drowned and dead.

Captain Traverse knew of the old fisherman's death through the newspapers
that found him in his foreign ports--not through Miss Frarnie's letters,
for she knew almost nothing of the existence or non-existence of such low
people; and therefore, conjecture as he needs must concerning Louie's
means of livelihood now, there was no intelligence to relieve any anxiety
he might have felt, or to inform him of the sale of the cottage to pay the
debt of the mortgage under which it was bought, or of the support that
Louie earned in helping her aunt watch with the sick and lay out the dead:
he could only be pricked with knowledge of the fact that he had no right
to his anxiety, or to the mention of her name even in his prayers--if he
said them.

Poor little Louie! A sad end to such a joyous youth as hers had been, you
would have said; but, in truth, her new work was soothing to her: her
heart was simply in harmony with suffering, with death and desolation, and
by degrees she found that comfort from her double sorrows in doing her
best to bring comfort to others which it may be she could never have found
had she been the pampered darling of some wealthy house. Often, when she
forgot what she was doing, Louie made surmises concerning Frarnie Maurice,
wondering if she were the noble thing that Andrew needed to ennoble
him--if she were really so strong and beautiful that the mere sight of her
had killed all thought or memory of an older love; trying to believe her
all that his guardian angel might wish his wife to be, and to acknowledge
that she herself was so low and small and ignorant that she could only
have injured him--to be convinced that it was neither weakness, nor
covetousness, nor perjury in Andrew, having met the sun, to forget the
shadows; wondering then if Frarnie cared for him as she herself had done,
and crying out aloud that that could never be, until the sound of her own
sobs woke her from her forbidden dream. But at other times a calm came to
Louie that was more pathetic than her wildest grief: it was the
acquiescence in what Providence had chosen for Andrew, cost herself what
it might--it was the submission of the atom beneath the wheels of the
great engine.

It is true that as, late in the night, when all the town was asleep and
only silence and she abroad, she walked home by herself from