y," he said, after a while, "and go
to rest, Lotty. The moans of this storm will wear your strength
out,"--leading her to the foot of the chamber-stairway.

She went up, pausing at the top to look back, a smile on her flushed
cheeks and swollen eyes.

"It will be a quiet morning," she said, waving a good-night.

There was some meaning in her words which he could not penetrate, but it
touched and startled him.

"A quiet morning?"

The words haunted the simple old man, sitting alone to watch the night
wear away. He had never been more utterly alone. The new home was
strange; the very wood-fire had burned out on the hearth; unfamiliar,
cold lines met his eye, wherever he turned; the heavy mist crept in from
the sea through every cranny, like vapors from a charnel-house. He had a
dull, superstitious dread of what lay beyond that sullen beach of
mist,--the undefined. There, whence these low rumblings, and sharp,
inarticulate cries reached him: he stood up, looking into it, shivering.
A bat swooped past the open window, and struck its clammy wing against
his face; the moon had gone down, and the mist that saturated his
clothes, so present and close at hand was it, stretched up and possessed
the very sky as well as the shore,--yellowed thickened the air he
breathed, hid the line where the breakers struck the coast, driven in
with a subdued, persistent fury he had never known before. The
shore-mist had its bounds: it did not touch that clear darkness beyond,
into which Jacobus looked, drawing down his grizzled brows, trying to
jeer his cowardice away.

"By daylight," he said, "it is but a bulk of water, full enough of
danger and death; but now it might be hell itself yonder, that has 'made
the clouds its band.'"

He was not sure how long a portion of the night crept by. Sometime in
it, however, he saw flashes of light moving through the fog among the
rocks: Lufflin and the fishermen keeping watch,--"uneasy ghosts that
could not pass over into Hades," he laughed, with the same miserable
attempt at a joke; but the laugh died away feebly in the empty room, and
it was with a grave face the Professor made his way down the dark
staircase, and, finding the Captain's dread-nought coat, put it on
before he ventured out into the storm. "To please Lotty," he muttered.
His heart was strangely tender to-night to the only friend he had known
for years.

There was a dead quiet in the fog as he came out and waited on the
flagging be