as happy. When she mentally contrasted this busy, loving
winter with the sorrows of the previous one, with the hunger and cold
and poverty, the anguish of death and the loneliness, she could not
but be grateful for the little home-harbour which her storm-tossed
heart had found again. If she had a regret, it was that she could not
retain her hold upon her finished life. Every time she asked her heart
after Roland, memory gave her pictures in fainter and fainter and
fainter colours. Roland was drifting farther and farther away.

She could no longer weep at his name. A gentle melancholy, a
half-sacred remoteness invested the years in which he had been the
light of her life. For

"When the lamp is shattered,
The light in the dust lies dead;
When the cloud is scattered,
The rainbow's glory is fled."

Mercifully, youth has this marvellous elasticity. And the children
filled all the vacant places in her life. For as yet she did not think
much nor at all decidedly about Tris. If Roland was slipping away from
memory, Tris by no means filled her heart. Yet she was pleased when
Ann Trewillow's little maid Gillian told her one morning:

"Master Arundel's yacht be come into harbour safe and sound, and
Captain Tris, he be brave and hearty, and busy all to get ashore
again. And my mother do say Mr. Arundel he be going to marry a fine
lady, and great doings at the Abbey, no doubt. And mother do say, too,
that Captain Tris will be marrying you. And I was a brave bit
frightened at that news, and I up and answered mother: 'It bean't so.
Miss Denas likes better teaching us boys and girls.' I said that, and
wishing it so with all my heart."

And Denas, seeing that the boys and girls were looking anxiously at
her for an assurance of this position, said positively:

"I am happier with you, children, than I could be with anyone else,
and I do not intend to marry at all."

"Never? Say never!"

"Well, then--never."

Yet there was a faint longing in her heart for love all her own. A man
can love what others love, but a woman wants something or someone to
love that is all her own. And she was interested enough in Tris'
return to dress with more than usual care that evening. She felt sure
he would come, and she put on her best black gown and did not brush
the ripples out of her front hair, but let the tiny tendrils soften
the austere gravity of her face and make that slight shadow behind the
ears which is so womanly and bec