him, and getting our revenge on the Fort, all at
the same time. Don't be mad, Jim dear, and do not be frighted fer me.
I'm going over thar to make it all right--to free HIM of stealing--to
have YOU left out of it all--and take it all on myself. Don't you be a
bit feared for me. I ain't skeert of the wind or of going. I'll close
reef everything, clear the creek, stretch across to Injen Island, hugg
the Point, and bear up fer Logport. Dear Jim--don't get mad--but I
couldn't bear this fooling of you nor HIM--and that man being took for
stealing any longer!--Your loving sister,

MAGGIE."

With a confused mingling of shame, anger, and sudden fear he ran out on
the gallery. The tide was well up, half the Marsh had already
vanished, and the little creek where he had moored his skiff was now an
empty shining river. The water was everywhere--fringing the tussocks
of salt grass with concentric curves of spume and drift, or
tumultuously tossing its white-capped waves over the spreading expanse
of the lower bay. The low thunder of breakers in the farther estuary
broke monotonously on the ear. But his eye was fascinated by a dull
shifting streak on the horizon, that, even as he gazed, shuddered,
whitened along its whole line, and then grew ghastly gray again. It
was the ocean bar.

IV.

"Well, I must say," said Cicely Preston, emphasizing the usual feminine
imperative for perfectly gratuitous statement, as she pushed back her
chair from the commandant's breakfast table, "I MUST really say that I
don't see anything particularly heroic in doing something wrong, lying
about it just to get other folks into trouble, and then rushing off to
do penance in a high wind and an open boat. But she's pretty, and
wears a man's shirt and coat, and of course THAT settles anything. But
why earrings and wet white stockings and slippers? And why that Gothic
arch of front and a boy's hat? That's what I simply ask;" and the
youngest daughter of Colonel Preston rose from the table, shook out the
skirt of her pretty morning dress, and, placing her little thumbs in
the belt of her smart waist, paused witheringly for a reply.

"You are most unfair, my child," returned Colonel Preston gravely. "Her
giving food and clothes to a deserter may have been only an ordinary
instinct of humanity towards a fellow-creature who appeared to be
suffering, to say nothing of M'Caffrey's plausible tongue. But her
periling her life to save him from a