with a sense of security he had never felt before. On such occasions
he was apt to leave his door open, and listen as for footsteps; for
what might not come to him out of this vague, nebulous world beyond?
Perhaps even SHE,--for this strange solitary was not insane nor
visionary. He was never in spirit alone. For night and day, sleeping
or waking, pacing the beach or crouching over his driftwood fire, a
woman's face was always before him,--the face for whose sake and for
cause of whom he sat there alone. He saw it in the morning sunlight;
it was her white hands that were lifted from the crested breakers; it
was the rustling of her skirt when the sea wind swept through the beach
grasses; it was the loving whisper of her low voice when the long waves
sank and died among the sedge and rushes. She was as omnipresent as
sea and sky and level sand. Hence when the fog wiped them away, she
seemed to draw closer to him in the darkness. On one or two more
gracious nights in midsummer, when the influence of the fervid noonday
sun was still felt on the heated sands, the warm breath of the fog
touched his cheek as if it had been hers, and the tears started to his
eyes.

Before the fogs came--for he arrived there in winter--he had found
surcease and rest in the steady glow of a lighthouse upon the little
promontory a league below his habitation. Even on the darkest nights,
and in the tumults of storm, it spoke to him of a patience that was
enduring and a steadfastness that was immutable. Later on he found a
certain dumb companionship in an uprooted tree, which, floating down
the river, had stranded hopelessly upon his beach, but in the evening
had again drifted away. Rowing across the estuary a day or two
afterward, he recognized the tree again from a "blaze" of the settler's
axe still upon its trunk. He was not surprised a week later to find
the same tree in the sands before his dwelling, or that the next
morning it should be again launched on its purposeless wanderings. And
so, impelled by wind or tide, but always haunting his seclusion, he
would meet it voyaging up the river at the flood, or see it tossing
among the breakers on the bar, but always with the confidence of its
returning sooner or later to an anchorage beside him. After the third
month of his self-imposed exile, he was forced into a more human
companionship, that was brief but regular. He was obliged to have
menial assistance. While he might have eaten hi