see a man--he is tall and beautiful--has dark hair and
rather a dark face."

"Pray don't say anything more. I don't want to know. Is he to break
the seals?"

"Then there is water--water--a long, long journey."

Maurice had listened to this conversation with feelings of mingled
amusement and pity, very much as he would have listened to a duet,
representing the usual mixture of gypsy and misguided innocence, in an
old-fashioned opera. That he was playing the eavesdropper had never
entered his mind. The scene seemed too utterly remote and unreal to
come within the pale of moral canons. But suddenly the aspect of
affairs underwent a revolution, as if the misguided young lady in the
opera had turned out to be his sister, and he himself under obligation
to interfere in her behalf. For at that moment there came an intense,
hurried whisper, to which he would fain have closed his ears:

"And does he care for me as I do for him?"

He sprang up, his ears tingling with shame, and hurried down the
beach. Presently it occurred to him, however, that it was not quite
chivalrous in him to leave little Elsie there alone with the
dark-minded sibyl. Who knew but that she might need his help? He
paused, and was about to retrace his steps, when he heard some one
approaching, whom he instinctively knew to be Elsie. As she came
nearer, the moon, which hung transfixed upon the flaming spear of a
glacier peak, revealed a distressed little face, through whose
transparent surface you might watch the play of emotions within, as
one watches the doings of tiny insects and fishes in an aquarium.

"What have they been doing to my little girl?" asked Fern, with a
voice full of paternal tenderness. "She has been crying, poor little
thing."

He may have been imprudent in addressing a girl of seventeen in this
tender fashion; but the truth was, her short skirts and the two long
braids of yellow hair were in his mind associated with that age toward
which you may, without offence, assume the role of a well-meaning
protector, and where even a kiss need not necessarily be resented. So
far from feeling flattered by the unwished-for recollection of Elsie's
feeling for him, he was rather disposed to view it as a pathological
phenomenon,--as a sort of malady, of which he would like to cure her.
It is not to be denied, however, that if this was his intention, the
course he was about to pursue was open to criticism. But it must be
borne in mind that Fern wa