ed, eagerly.

"When you get back I will be there," she promised.

After that they sat and talked for long and long, while the blue sea
sparkled in the summer morning sun. When, at length, they rose to go,
there was a light that never shone on land or sea in his face and in
hers. There had been no further promises; only that one: "When you get
back I will be there." But each heart understood the other, and she
rejoiced to wait further declaration of his love until he could,
according to his tender fancy, make it to her as in his "dream come
true."

On the beach as they strolled back, it was her eyes--shining with a
soft, new radiance--that first caught sight of something; her fancy
that first grasped its significance. "Look!" she cried. In a
bowl-like hollow of a big brown rock, the receding tide had left a
little pool of sea-water. "It's left behind--this bit of the infinite,
unresting sea!" she said. "Who knows what far, far shores it's come
from? And now, here it is, and the great mother-sea's gone off and
left it."

He smiled tenderly at her sweet whimsy. "The great mother-sea will
come back for it at sundown," he reminded her.

"Yes--yes"--perhaps it was the coming separation between the two that
made her voice quaver so sympathetically--"the Infinite always comes
back for us. But we don't always remember that it will! This is such
a little bit of the great sea. Maybe it never was left alone before;
maybe it doesn't know how surely the waters that left it behind will
come back for it this evening. Maybe it's--it's lonesome. I--I think
I know how it feels."

"And I," he said.

"Next time you feel that way will you remember this brown rock and the
tide that is so surely coming back tonight?" she asked.

"Indeed I will," he told her.

"And so will I," she went on. "And I'll try to remember, too, that
perhaps it was put here for us to see and think of when we need
encouragement--just as, I dare say, we are left behind, sometimes, so
that other lonely folk may see us and be reminded that----" She
stopped.

"That what?" he asked.

"Why!" she cried, "it's the Secret! The more you live, the more
everything helps you to believe the Secret and to feel the brotherhood
it brings."

He looked guilty. "I don't deserve to know the Secret," he said,
"after last night. But----"

"But I am going to tell you," she declared, "so when you're far away
from what you love most, or when you're with peop