this, Moses? If it is true, why have
you done as you have this summer?"

"Because I was a fool, Mara,--because I was jealous of Mr.
Adams,--because I somehow hoped, after all, that you either loved me or
that I might make you think more of me through jealousy of another. They
say that love always is shown by jealousy."

"Not true love, I should think," said Mara. "How _could_ you do so?--it
was cruel to her,--cruel to me."

"I admit it,--anything, everything you can say. I have acted like a fool
and a knave, if you will; but after all, Mara, I do love you. I know I
am not worthy of you--never was--never can be; you are in all things a
true, noble woman, and I have been unmanly."

It is not to be supposed that all this was spoken without accompaniments
of looks, movements, and expressions of face such as we cannot give, but
such as doubled their power to the parties concerned; and the "I love
you" had its usual conclusive force as argument, apology,
promise,--covering, like charity, a multitude of sins.

Half an hour after, you might have seen a youth and a maiden coming
together out of the door of the brown house, and walking arm in arm
toward the sea-beach.

It was one of those wonderfully clear moonlight evenings, when the
ocean, like a great reflecting mirror, seems to double the brightness of
the sky,--and its vast expanse lay all around them in its stillness,
like an eternity of waveless peace. Mara remembered that time in her
girlhood when she had followed Moses into the woods on just such a
night,--how she had sat there under the shadows of the trees, and looked
over to Harpswell and noticed the white houses and the meeting-house,
all so bright and clear in the moonlight, and then off again on the
other side of the island where silent ships were coming and going in the
mysterious stillness. They were talking together now with that
outflowing fullness which comes when the seal of some great reserve has
just been broken,--going back over their lives from day to day, bringing
up incidents of childhood, and turning them gleefully like two children.

And then Moses had all the story of his life to relate, and to tell Mara
all he had learned of his mother,--going over with all the narrative
contained in Mr. Sewell's letter.

"You see, Mara, that it was intended that you should be my fate," he
ended; "so the winds and waves took me up and carried me to the lonely
island where the magic princess dwelt."

"You