by, with much labor it must be
admitted, they were able to spell out messages that flickered their way
through the night with the beauty of a firefly's revel; but when Jack
had taken up work with the coast guard, this old-time substitute for
speech had been abandoned, giving place to the briefer method of three
nightly flashes. Neither toil nor illness, rain, snow or tempest had
in all the years prevented Sarah Libbie from being at her post at
twilight, there to watch for the gleam of Jack's lantern, whose rays
she answered with the light from her own. Even when fogs obscured the
Bar so that the distant headland was cut off from view, Sarah Libbie
would go through the little ceremony and after it was over return to
her knitting with a quiet gladness, although the presence of the other
factor in the drama was a mere matter of conjecture.

Thus the romance had drifted on, and Jack Nickerson now faced his
fiftieth year and was no nearer bringing the love story to a
culmination than he had been when as a boy in his teens he had gazed
into Sarah Libbie's blue eyes and registered the vows he had never yet
dared utter. Nevertheless lonely and disappointed as was Sarah Libbie,
Jack was a thousand times more miserable. To-night, especially, as he
tramped the coast in the teeth of the gale, he thought of Willie
Spence's ridicule and one of his periodic moods of self-abasement came
upon him. What a wretched cur he was! How lacking in nerve! Any
woman, he muttered to himself, was better off without such a
feeble-willed, spineless husband!

The fierce winds and whirling sands that stung his cheeks and buffeted
him seemed a merited castigation, a castigation that amounted to a
penance. He welcomed their punishment. As he stumbled on through the
pitch black of the night, he asked himself what he was going to do.
Was he always to go on loving Sarah Libbie and letting her love him and
never in manly fashion bring the affair to a climax? If he did not
mean to make her his wife, had he the right to stand in the way and
prevent her from marrying some one else? The baldness of the question
brought him up with a turn, and as he paused breathlessly awaiting his
own verdict, his eye was caught by the lantern dangling from his hand.
He regarded it with slow wonder as if he had never seen it before. Why
had he never thought until now of this method of communication? Not
only was it simple and direct, but it also obviated the diffic