indedly together, for her fixed gaze seemed to show that
her thoughts were intent upon some other matter.

"Well, I don't know about ugliness," she said at length.

"But he doesn't ask it of you?" Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. "Not that grave
young man with the steady brown eyes?"

"He doesn't ask anything--we neither of us ask anything."

"If I could help you, Katharine, by the memory of what I felt--"

"Yes, tell me what you felt."

Mrs. Hilbery, her eyes growing blank, peered down the enormously long
corridor of days at the far end of which the little figures of herself
and her husband appeared fantastically attired, clasping hands upon a
moonlit beach, with roses swinging in the dusk.

"We were in a little boat going out to a ship at night," she began. "The
sun had set and the moon was rising over our heads. There were lovely
silver lights upon the waves and three green lights upon the steamer in
the middle of the bay. Your father's head looked so grand against the
mast. It was life, it was death. The great sea was round us. It was the
voyage for ever and ever."

The ancient fairy-tale fell roundly and harmoniously upon Katharine's
ears. Yes, there was the enormous space of the sea; there were the three
green lights upon the steamer; the cloaked figures climbed up on deck.
And so, voyaging over the green and purple waters, past the cliffs and
the sandy lagoons and through pools crowded with the masts of ships
and the steeples of churches--here they were. The river seemed to have
brought them and deposited them here at this precise point. She looked
admiringly at her mother, that ancient voyager.

"Who knows," exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, continuing her reveries, "where we
are bound for, or why, or who has sent us, or what we shall find--who
knows anything, except that love is our faith--love--" she crooned, and
the soft sound beating through the dim words was heard by her daughter
as the breaking of waves solemnly in order upon the vast shore that she
gazed upon. She would have been content for her mother to repeat that
word almost indefinitely--a soothing word when uttered by another, a
riveting together of the shattered fragments of the world. But Mrs.
Hilbery, instead of repeating the word love, said pleadingly:

"And you won't think those ugly thoughts again, will you, Katharine?" at
which words the ship which Katharine had been considering seemed to put
into harbor and have done with its seafaring. Yet she was i