by yielding to its first untaught impulses. She repressed herself as
the mother does who refrains from crying out when she sees her
unconscious little one on the verge of a precipice.

When Moses rose and moodily began walking homeward, she followed at a
distance. She could now keep farther off, for she knew the way through
every part of the forest, and she only wanted to keep within sound of
his footsteps to make sure that he was going home. When he emerged from
the forest into the open moonlight, she sat down in its shadows and
watched him as he walked over the open distance between her and the
house. He went in; and then she waited a little longer for him to be
quite retired. She thought he would throw himself on the bed, and then
she could steal in after him. So she sat there quite in the shadows.

The grand full moon was riding high and calm in the purple sky, and
Harpswell Bay on the one hand, and the wide, open ocean on the other,
lay all in a silver shimmer of light. There was not a sound save the
plash of the tide, now beginning to go out, and rolling and rattling
the pebbles up and down as it came and went, and once in a while the
distant, mournful intoning of the whippoorwill. There were silent lonely
ships, sailing slowly to and fro far out to sea, turning their fair
wings now into bright light and now into shadow, as they moved over the
glassy stillness. Mara could see all the houses on Harpswell Neck and
the white church as clear as in the daylight. It seemed to her some
strange, unearthly dream.

As she sat there, she thought over her whole little life, all full of
one thought, one purpose, one love, one prayer, for this being so
strangely given to her out of that silent sea, which lay so like a still
eternity around her,--and she revolved again what meant the vision of
her childhood. Did it not mean that she was to watch over him and save
him from some dreadful danger? That poor mother was lying now silent and
peaceful under the turf in the little graveyard not far off, and _she_
must care for her boy.

A strong motherly feeling swelled out the girl's heart,--she felt that
she _must_, she would, somehow save that treasure which had so
mysteriously been committed to her. So, when she thought she had given
time enough for Moses to be quietly asleep in his room, she arose and
ran with quick footsteps across the moonlit plain to the house.

The front-door was standing wide open, as was always the innoce