on Tyee Head called to her to desert her hopeless fight and
in the blue depths out yonder find haven from the tempests of her
soul.

In an elder day, when the Sawdust Pile had been Port Agnew's
garbage-dump, folks who clipped their rose bushes and thinned out
their marigold plants had been accustomed to seeing these slips take
root again and bloom on the Sawdust Pile for a brief period after
their ash-cans had been emptied there; and, though she did not know
it, Nan Brent bore pitiful resemblance to these outcast flowers. Here,
on the reclaimed Sawdust Pile, she had bloomed from girlhood into
lovely womanhood--a sweet forget-me-not in the Garden of Life, she had
been transplanted into Eden until Fate, the grim gardener, had cast
her out, to take root again on the Sawdust Pile and ultimately to
wither and die.

It is terrible for the great of soul, the ambitious, the imaginative,
when circumstances condemn them to life amid dull, uninteresting,
drab, and sometimes sordid surroundings. Born to love and be loved,
Nan Brent's soul beat against her environment even as a wild bird,
captured and loosed in a room, beats against the window-pane. From the
moment she had felt within her the vague stirrings of womanhood, she
had been wont to gaze upon the blue-back hills to the east, to the
horizon out west, wondering what mysteries lay beyond, and yearning to
encounter them. Perhaps it was the sea-faring instinct, the
_Wanderlust_ of her forebears; perhaps it was a keener appreciation of
the mediocrity of Port Agnew than others in the little town possessed,
a realization that she had more to give to life than life had to give
to her. Perhaps it had been merely the restlessness that is the twin
of a rare heritage--the music of the spheres--for with such had Nan
been born. It is hard to harken for the reedy music of Pan and hear
only the whine of a sawmill or the boom of the surf.

Of her mother, Nan had seen but little. Her recollections of her
mother were few and vague; of her mother's people, she knew nothing
save the fact that they dwelt in a world quite free of Brents, and
that her mother had committed a distinctly social _faux pas_ in
marrying Caleb Brent she guessed long before Caleb Brent, in his brave
simplicity, had imparted that fact to her. An admiral's daughter,
descendant of an old and wealthy Revolutionary family, the males of
which had deemed any calling other than the honorable profession of
arms as beneath the