born of love for the man of her choice.

For Sheila knew how Tunis Latham suffered. She felt that her course
was right; nevertheless she fully appreciated how keen the blow of
her decision fell upon the partner in her sin.

A sin it was--almost, it seemed to her now, an unpardonable crime.
To seize upon another girl's identity; to usurp another's chance; to
foist herself upon the unsuspecting and kindly souls at the Ball
homestead in a way that raised for them a happiness that was merely
a phantom--the thought of it all was now a draught of which the
dregs were very, very bitter.

Over and over again she recalled all that Ida May Bostwick had said
to and of her. It was all true! Coarse and unfeeling as the shopgirl
was, Sheila lashed her troubled soul with the thought that what Ida
May had said was deserved. Neither circumstances nor the fact that
Tunis had suggested the masquerade excused the transgression.

The days of her waiting on fate, alone in the cabin under Wreckers'
Head, gave no surcease to her mental castigation. Her sin loomed the
more huge as the hours dragged their slow length by.

And yet, with it all, Sheila's keenest anguish came through her
renunciation of Tunis' love. She could see no possible way of
holding to that if she would purge herself of the fault she had
committed.

And above the stain of her false position since she had come to the
Cape was the overcloud of that accusation which had first warped
Sheila Macklin's life and humbled her spirit. She believed that she
could never escape the shame of that prosecution and punishment for
a crime she had not committed.

She believed that, no matter where she might go nor how blamelessly
she might live, the fact that she had been sentenced to a woman's
reformatory would crop up like the ugly memory of a horrid dream to
embitter her existence. Was her life linked with Tunis Latham's, he
must suffer also from that misfortune.

And so Sheila Macklin waited from hour to hour, from day to day,
dully and in a brooding spirit, for release from a situation which
must in time embitter her whole nature.

* * * * *

From the cabin at the foot of the seaward bluff of Wreckers' Head,
the coming of the black gale out of the northeast was watched
anxiously by Sheila, from the very break of this day. Tunis might be
on the sea. She doubted if the threat of bad weather would hold the
_Seamew_ in port.

There was no rain--j