HOPKINS.

SISTER ST. LUKE.

They found her over there. "This is more than I expected," said
Carrington as they landed--"seven pairs of Spanish eyes at once."

"Three pairs," answered Keith, fastening the statement to fact and the
boat to a rock in his calm way; "and one if not two of the pairs are
Minorcan."

The two friends crossed the broad white beach toward the little stone
house of the light-keeper, who sat in the doorway, having spent the
morning watching their sail cross over from Pelican reef, tacking
lazily east and west--an event of more than enough importance in his
isolated life to have kept him there, gazing and contented, all day.
Behind the broad shoulders of swarthy Pedro stood a little figure
clothed in black; and as the man lifted himself lazily at last and came
down to meet them, and his wife stepped briskly forward, they saw that
the third person was a nun--a large-eyed, fragile little creature,
promptly introduced by Melvyna, the keeper's wife, as "Sister St.
Luke." For the keeper's wife, in spite of her black eyes, was not a
Minorcan at all; not even a southerner. Melvyna Sawyer was born in
Vermont, and, by one of the strange chances of this vast, many-raced,
motley country of ours, she had travelled south as nurse, and a very
good, energetic nurse too, albeit somewhat sharp-voiced, to a delicate
young wife, who had died in the sunny land, as so many of them die; the
sun, with all his good will and with all his shining, not being able to
undo in three months the work of long years of the snows and the bleak
east winds of New England.

The lady dead, and her poor thin frame sent northward again to lie in
the hillside churchyard by the side of bleak Puritan ancestors, Melvyna
looked about her. She hated the lazy tropical land, and had packed her
calf-skin trunk to go, when Pedro Gonsalvez surprised her by proposing
matrimony. At least that is what she wrote to her Aunt Clemanthy, away
up in Vermont; and although Pedro may not have used the words, he at
least meant the fact, for they were married two weeks later by a
justice of the peace, whom Melvyna's sharp eyes had unearthed, she of
course deeming the padre of the little parish and one or two attendant
priests as so much dust to be trampled energetically under her shoes,
Protestant and number six and a half double-soled mediums. The justice
of the peace, a good natured old gentleman who had forgotten that he
held the office at all, s