my
most brilliant forensic effort, and I'll not risk my reputation again."

"Keep out of our way then!" said Strong. "Wharton and I mean to spill
those two girls over the cliff unless Canadian horses know geology."

Esther slept soundly that night while the roar of the waters lulled her
slumbers. The sun woke her the next morning to a sense of new life. Her
room looked down on the cataract, and she had already taken a fancy to
this tremendous, rushing, roaring companion, which thundered and smoked
under her window, as though she had tamed a tornado to play in her
court-yard. To brush her hair while such a confidant looked on and asked
questions, was more than Pallas Athene herself could do, though she
looked out forever from the windows of her Acropolis over the Blue
AEgean. The sea is capricious, fickle, angry, fawning, violent, savage
and wanton; it caresses and raves in a breath, and has its moods of
silence, but Esther's huge playmate rambled on with its story, in the
same steady voice, never shrill or angry, never silent or degraded by a
sign of human failings, and yet so frank and sympathetic that she had no
choice but to like it. "Even if it had nothing to tell me, its manners
are divine," said Esther to herself as she leaned against the window
sash and looked out. "And its dress!" she ran on. "What a complexion, to
stand dazzling white and diamonds in the full sunlight!" Yet it was not
the manners or the dress of her new friend that most won Esther's heart.
Her excitement and the strain of the last month had left her subject to
her nerves and imagination. She was startled by a snow-flake, was
reckless and timid by turns, and her fancy ran riot in dreams of love
and pain. She fell in love with the cataract and turned to it as a
confidant, not because of its beauty or power, but because it seemed to
tell her a story which she longed to understand. "I think I do
understand it," she said to herself as she looked out. "If he could only
hear it as I do," and of course "he" was Mr. Hazard; "how he would feel
it!" She felt tears roll down her face as she listened to the voice of
the waters and knew that they were telling her a different secret from
any that Hazard could ever hear. "He will think it is the church
talking!" Sad as she was, she smiled as she thought that it was Sunday
morning, and a ludicrous contrast flashed on her mind between the
decorations of St. John's, with its parterre of nineteenth century
bonnet