you?"

"Shelter your Aunt Lucretia. Shelter your business prospects.
Shelter the good name of your mother's son. You can do me absolutely
no good by telling any different story from the one I was forced to
tell. Let it be, Tunis."

She said it wearily. She dropped her eyes again, looking away from
him. But when he would have stepped nearer and caught her to him,
she leaped up and with look and tone warded him away.

"Don't touch me! Be at least so kind, Tunis. Make it no harder for
me than you can help."

"You are breaking my heart, Sheila!"

"Mine is already broken," she told him. "And I do not blame you,
Tunis. It is the punishment for my own sins. I attempted to escape
from my overwhelming troubles in a wrong way. I see it now. I know
it to be so. I must go somewhere else and build again--if I may. But
never again upon a foundation of trickery and deceit. Oh! Never!
Never!"

She stepped around the big block on which she had been sitting,
entered the cabin, and closed the door behind her. She left him
standing there hopeless, miserable, almost distraught by all the
entanglements of this tragedy that had come upon them.

CHAPTER XXX

THE STORM

Captain Tunis Latham, pacing the deck of the _Seamew_, had come to a
conclusion which was by no means complimentary to his own
self-respect. During his manifold duties and the business bothers
connected with the sailing of the undermanned schooner, his mind had
seized upon and grappled with a train of ideas which brought him
logically to the decision that he was playing a weak and piffling
part.

Strong in most things, Tunis Latham had allowed his better sense to
be throttled and his purpose balked in the thing which meant more to
him than the schooner, his business success, or anything else in
life. The broader the rift grew between Sheila and himself, the
clearer he saw that without her he was a ship without a rudder and
that nothing could come of his life save wreck and disaster.

She had renounced him for his own good, as she believed, and he had
tacitly consented to her ruling. He might be slow of thought
regarding such things, but once having made up his mind--and it was
made up now--he was of the kind that obstacles do not frighten.

Not only did he realize that by bowing to the girl's will he had
been weak, but he was determined to take matters in the future into
his own hands. He should not have allowed Sheila, in the first
place, to shoulder