ngs, had proceeded to
the issue with delicate caution, creeping toward it by inches, as a
man stalks a caribou. He too had been aware of rivalry; and, having
surmised Tommy Lark's intention, he had sought the maid out
unwittingly, not an hour after her passionate adventure with Tommy
Lark, and had then cast the die of his own happiness.

In both cases the effect had been the same. Elizabeth Luke had wept
and fled to her mother like a frightened child; and she had
thereafter protested, with tears of indecision, torn this way and that
until her heart ached beyond endurance, that she was not sure of her
love for either, but felt that she loved both, nor could tell whom she
loved the most, if either at all. In this agony of confusion,
terrifying for a maid, she had fled beyond her mother's arms, to her
grandmother's cottage at Grace Harbor, there to deliberate and decide,
as she said; and she had promised to speed her conclusion with all the
determination she could command, and to return a letter of decision.

In simple communities, such as Scalawag Harbor, a telegram is a
shocking incident. Bad news must be sped; good news may await a
convenient time. A telegram signifies the very desperation of haste
and need--it conveys news only of the most momentous import; and upon
every man into whose hands it falls it lays a grave obligation to
expedite its delivery. Tommy Lark had never before touched a telegram;
he had never before clapped eyes on one. He was vaguely aware of the
telegram as a mystery of wire and a peculiar cunning of men. Telegrams
had come to Scalawag Harbor in times of disaster in the course of
Tommy Lark's nineteen years of life. Widow Mull, for example, when the
_White Wolf_ was cast away at the ice, with George Mull found frozen
on the floe, had been told of it in a telegram.

All the while, thus, Tommy Lark's conception of the urgency of the
matter mounted high and oppressed him. Elizabeth Luke would not
lightly dispatch a telegram from Grace Harbor to her mother at
Scalawag. All the way from Grace Harbor? Not so! After all, this could
be no message having to do with the affairs of Tommy Lark and Sandy
Rowl. Elizabeth would not have telegraphed such sentimental news. She
would have written a letter. Something was gone awry with the maid.
She was in trouble. She was in need. She was ill. She might be dying.
And the more Tommy Lark reflected, as he climbed the dripping Black
Cliff path, the more surely was