gue of flame. She loved him! He
felt a sort of triumph in it, for he was sure Sally must know, they were
so intimate. Well, he would go to her, and tell her all, confess all his
sins, and be forgiven.

When he came back to the house, all was still evening. The moon, which
was playing brightly on the distant sea, left one side of the brown
house in shadow. Moses saw a light gleaming behind the curtain in the
little room on the lower floor, which had been his peculiar sanctum
during the summer past. He had made a sort of library of it, keeping
there his books and papers. Upon the white curtain flitted, from time to
time, a delicate, busy shadow; now it rose and now it stooped, and then
it rose again--grew dim and vanished, and then came out again. His heart
beat quick.

Mara was in his room, busy, as she always had been before his
departures, in cares for him. How many things had she made for him, and
done and arranged for him, all his life long! things which he had taken
as much as a matter of course as the shining of that moon. His thought
went back to the times of his first going to sea,--he a rough, chaotic
boy, sensitive and surly, and she the ever thoughtful good angel of a
little girl, whose loving-kindness he had felt free to use and to abuse.
He remembered that he made her cry there when he should have spoken
lovingly and gratefully to her, and that the words of acknowledgment
that ought to have been spoken, never had been said,--remained unsaid to
that hour. He stooped low, and came quite close to the muslin curtain.
All was bright in the room, and shadowy without; he could see her
movements as through a thin white haze. She was packing his sea-chest;
his things were lying about her, folded or rolled nicely. Now he saw her
on her knees writing something with a pencil in a book, and then she
enveloped it very carefully in silk paper, and tied it trimly, and hid
it away at the bottom of the chest. Then she remained a moment kneeling
at the chest, her head resting in her hands. A sort of strange, sacred
feeling came over him as he heard a low murmur, and knew that she felt a
Presence that he never felt or acknowledged. He felt somehow that he was
doing her a wrong thus to be prying upon moments when she thought
herself alone with God; a sort of vague remorse filled him; he felt as
if she were too good for him. He turned away, and entering the front
door of the house, stepped noiselessly along and lifted the latch