, he is to frighten away
trespassers. Do you understand?" he demanded of the sailorman. "Your
duty is to protect this beautiful lady. So long as I love her you must
guard this place. It is a life sentence. You are always on watch. You
never sleep. You are her slave. She says you have a friendly smile. She
wrongs you. It is a beseeching, abject, worshipping smile. I am sure
when I look at her mine is equally idiotic. In fact, we are in many ways
alike. I also am her slave. I also am devoted only to her service. And I
never sleep, at least not since I met her."

From her throne among the pine needles Helen looked up at the sailorman
and frowned.

"It is not a happy simile," she objected. "For one thing, a sailorman
has a sweetheart in every port."

"Wait and see," said Latimer.

"And," continued the girl with some asperity, "if there is anything on
earth that changes its mind as often as a weather-vane, that is less
CERTAIN, less CONSTANT--"

"Constant?" Latimer laughed at her in open scorn. "You come back here,"
he challenged, "months from now, years from now, when the winds have
beaten him, and the sun blistered him, and the snow frozen him, and you
will find him smiling at you just as he is now, just as confidently,
proudly, joyously, devotedly. Because those who are your slaves, those
who love YOU, cannot come to any harm; only if you disown them, only if
you drive them away!"

The sailorman, delighted at such beautiful language, threw himself about
in a delirium of joy. His arms spun in their sockets like Indian clubs,
his oars flashed in the sun, and his eyes and lips were fixed in one
blissful, long-drawn-out, unalterable smile.

When the golden-rod turned gray, and the leaves red and yellow, and it
was time for Latimer to return to his work in the West, he came to say
good-by. But the best Helen could do to keep hope alive in him was to
say that she was glad he cared. She added it was very helpful to think
that a man such as he believed you were so fine a person, and during the
coming winter she would try to be like the fine person he believed her
to be, but which, she assured him, she was not.

Then he told her again she was the most wonderful being in the world, to
which she said: "Oh, indeed no!" and then, as though he were giving her
a cue, he said: "Good-by!" But she did not take up his cue, and they
shook hands. He waited, hardly daring to breathe.

"Surely, now that the parting has come," he assu