ho could blame them for not resting content
with baiting lobster pots and dredging for scallops? Were he a young
man with his path untrodden before him he would have been one of the
first to do the same, Willie confessed. Did he not constantly covet
their youth and opportunity? Nevertheless, praiseworthy as their
motive had been, the fact remained that nowhere in the village was
there a man the peer of Delight Hathaway. Rare in her girlish beauty,
rarer yet in her promise of womanhood, what a prize she would be for
him who had the fineness of fiber to appreciate the guerdon!

Willie was wont to attest that he himself was not a marrying man; yet
notwithstanding the assertion, deep down within the fastness of his
soul he had had his visions,--visions pure, exalted and characteristic
of his sensitively attuned nature. They were the exquisite secrets of
his life; the unfulfilled dreams that had kept him holy; a part of the
divine in him; echoes of hungers and longings that reached unsatisfied
into a world other than this. Earth had failed to consummate the loves
and ambitions of the dreamer. His had been a flattened, warped,
starved existence whose perfecting was not of this sphere. And as
without bitterness he reviewed the glories that had passed him by, he
prayed that these bounties might not also be denied her who, rounding
into the full splendor of her womanhood, was worthy of the best heaven
had to bestow.

From her childhood he had watched her virtues unfold and none of their
potentialities had gone unobserved by the quiet little old man.
Through the beauty of his own soul he had been enabled to translate the
beauties of another, until gradually Delight Hathaway had come to
symbolize for him universal woman, the prototype of all that was
purest, most selfless, most tender; most to be revered, watched over,
beloved. Yet for all his worship the girl remained for him very human,
a creature with bewitching and appealing ways. In the same spirit in
which he rejoiced in the tint of a rose's petal or the shell-like flush
of a cloud at dawn did he find pleasure in the crimson that colored her
cheek, in the perfection of her features, in the shadowy, fathomless
depths of her eyes. Father, brother, lover, artist, at her shrine he
offered up a composite devotion which sought only her happiness.

With such an attitude of mind to satisfy was it a marvel that in the
matter of selecting a husband for his divinity Willie