sten now; stand still and listen--listen to the sea,"
said Keith, when they had turned the point and stood alone on the
shore. "Try to think only of the pure, deep, blue water, and count how
regularly the sound rolls up in long, low chords, dying away and then
growing louder, dying away and then growing louder, as regular as your
own breath. Do you not hear it?"

"Yes," said the little Sister timorously.

"Keep time, then, with your hand, and let me see whether you catch the
measure."

So the small brown hand, nerveless and slender, tried to mark and
measure the roar of the great ocean surges, and at last succeeded,
urged on by the alternate praises and rebukes of Keith, who watched
with some interest a faint color rise in the pale, oval face, and an
intent listening look come into the soft, unconscious eyes, as, for the
first time, the mind caught the mighty rhythm of the sea. She listened,
and listened, standing mute, with head slightly bent and parted lips.

"I want you to listen to it that way every day," said Keith, as he led
the way back. "It has different voices: sometimes a fresh, joyous song,
sometimes a faint, loving whisper; but always something. You will learn
in time to love it, and then it will sing to you all day long."

"Not at the dear convent; there is no ocean there."

"You want to go back to the convent, I suppose?"

"Oh, could I go? Could I go?" said the Sister, not impatiently, but
with an intense yearning in her low voice. "Here, so lost, so strange
am I, so wild is everything---- But I must not murmur"; and she crossed
her hands upon her breast and bowed her head.

* * * * *

The young men led a riotous life; they rioted with the ocean, with the
winds, with the level island, with the sunshine and the racing clouds.
They sailed over to the reef daily and plunged into the surf; they
walked for miles along the beach, and ran races over its white floor;
they hunted down the centre of the island, and brought back the little
brown deer who lived in the low thicket on each side of the island's
backbone. The island was twenty miles long, and a mile or two broad,
with a central ridge of shell-formed rock about twenty feet in height,
that seemed like an Appalachian chain on the level waste; below, in the
little hollows on each side, spread a low tangled thicket, a few yards
wide; and all the rest was barren sand, with moveable hills here and
there--hills a