he house and the tower to keep them busy.
The weather was fair. The worst thing was the short supply of food.
But though they were hungry, they were not starving. And Nataline still
played the fife. She jested, she sang, she told long fairy stories while
they sat in the kitchen. Marcel admitted that it was not at all a bad
arrangement.

But his thoughts turned very often to the arrival of the supply-boat.
He hoped it would not be late. The ice was well broken up already and
driven far out into the gulf. The boat ought to be able to run down the
shore in good time.

One evening as Nataline came down from her sleep she saw Marcel coming
up the rocks dragging a young seal behind him.

"Hurra!" he shouted, "here is plenty of meat. I shot it out at the end
of the island, about an hour ago."

But Nataline said that they did not need the seal. There was still food
enough in the larder. On shore there must be greater need. Marcel must
take the seal over to the mainland that night and leave it on the beach
near the priest's house. He grumbled a little, but he did it.

That was on the twenty-third of April. The clear sky held for three
days longer, calm, bright, halcyon weather. On the afternoon of the
twenty-seventh the clouds came down from the north, not a long furious
tempest, but a brief, sharp storm, with considerable wind and a
whirling, blinding fall of April snow. It was a bad night for boats at
sea, confusing, bewildering, a night when the lighthouse had to do its
best. Nataline was in the tower all night, tending the lamp, watching
the clockwork. Once it seemed to her that the lantern was so covered
with snow that light could not shine through. She got her long brush
and scraped the snow away. It was cold work, but she gloried in it. The
bright eye of the tower, winking, winking steadily through the storm
seemed to be the sign of her power in the world. It was hers. She kept
it shining.

When morning came the wind was still blowing fitfully off shore, but
the snow had almost ceased. Nataline stopped the clockwork, and was just
climbing up into the lantern to put out the lamp, when Marcel's voice
hailed her.

"Come down, Nataline, come down quick. Make haste!"

She turned and hurried out, not knowing what was to come; perhaps a
message of trouble from the mainland, perhaps a new assault on the
lighthouse.

As she came out of the tower, her brown eyes heavy from the night-watch,
her dark face pale from the co