as going to hear good news of her."

"A dream--a dream," scoffed the old Doctor.

"Likely--likely," conceded Captain Jim. "That's what _I_ said to him
at the time. It was a vast more comfortable to think so. I didn't
like the idea of him seeing things like that--it was real uncanny.

"'No,' says he, 'I didn't dream it. But we won't talk of this again.
You won't be so much my friend if you think much about it.'

"I told him nothing could make me any less his friend. But he jest
shook his head and says, says he:

"'Lad, I know. I've lost friends before because of this. I don't
blame them. There are times when I feel hardly friendly to myself
because of it. Such a power has a bit of divinity in it--whether of a
good or an evil divinity who shall say? And we mortals all shrink from
too close contact with God or devil.'

"Them was his words. I remember them as if 'twas yesterday, though I
didn't know jest what he meant. What do you s'pose he DID mean,
doctor?"

"I doubt if he knew what he meant himself," said Doctor Dave testily.

"I think I understand," whispered Anne. She was listening in her old
attitude of clasped lips and shining eyes. Captain Jim treated himself
to an admiring smile before he went on with his story.

"Well, purty soon all the Glen and Four Winds people knew the
schoolmaster's bride was coming, and they were all glad because they
thought so much of him. And everybody took an interest in his new
house--THIS house. He picked this site for it, because you could see
the harbor and hear the sea from it. He made the garden out there for
his bride, but he didn't plant the Lombardies. Mrs. Ned Russell
planted THEM. But there's a double row of rose-bushes in the garden
that the little girls who went to the Glen school set out there for the
schoolmaster's bride. He said they were pink for her cheeks and white
for her brow and red for her lips. He'd quoted poetry so much that he
sorter got into the habit of talking it, too, I reckon.

"Almost everybody sent him some little present to help out the
furnishing of the house. When the Russells came into it they were
well-to-do and furnished it real handsome, as you can see; but the
first furniture that went into it was plain enough. This little house
was rich in love, though. The women sent in quilts and tablecloths and
towels, and one man made a chest for her, and another a table and so
on. Even blind old Aunt Margaret Boyd wove a l