h
a match must not be. It meant ruin for both. She must prevent the affair
going further. She must break off the intimacy. She must save those two
young people from making a mistake which would--She wrung her hands as
she thought of it. Of her own sorrow and trouble she characteristically
thought nothing now. Sacrifice of self was a part of Keziah's nature.

The pines were a deep-green blotch against the cloudy sky and the gloomy
waters of the bay. She skirted the outlying clumps of bayberry and beach
plum bushes and entered the grove. The pine needles made a soft carpet
which deadened her footfalls, and the shadows beneath the boughs were
thick and black. She tiptoed on until she reached the clearing by the
brink of the bluff. No one was in sight. She drew a breath of relief.
Kyan might be mistaken, after all.

Then she heard low voices. As she crouched at the edge of the grove, two
figures passed slowly across the clearing, along the bush-bordered path
and into the shrubbery beyond. John Ellery was walking with Grace
Van Horne. He was holding her hand in his and they were talking very
earnestly.

Keziah did not follow. What would have been the use? This was not the
time to speak. She KNEW now and she knew, also, that the responsibility
was hers. She must go home at once, go home to be alone and to think.
She tiptoed back through the grove and across the fields.

Yet, if she had waited, she might have seen something else which would
have been, at least, interesting. She had scarcely reached the outer
edge of the grove when another figure passed stealthily along that
narrow path by the bluff edge. A female figure treading very carefully,
rising to peer over the bushes at the minister and Grace. The figure of
Miss Annabel Daniels, the "belle" of Trumet. And Annabel's face was not
pleasant to look upon.

CHAPTER XI

IN WHICH CAPTAIN EBEN RECEIVES A CALLER

At the edge of the bluff, just where the pines and the bayberry bushes
were thickest, where the narrow, crooked little footpath dipped over the
rise and down to the pasture land and the salt meadow, John Ellery
and Grace had halted in their walk. It was full tide and the miniature
breakers plashed amid the seaweed on the beach. The mist was drifting in
over the bay and the gulls were calling sleepily from their perch along
the breakwater. A night hawk swooped and circled above the tall "feather
grass" by the margin of the creek. The minister's face was pale,