an mould, with the lines of character well emphasized; lips
that would be passionate but for--no, lips that _will_ be passionate
when the hour and the man arrive. A soul strong in the strength of
transparent purity, which would send her to the stake for a principle,
or to the Isle of Lepers with her lover. A typical heroine for a story
in which the hero is a man who might need to borrow a conscience."

He read it over thoughtfully when it was finished, changing a word here
and a phrase there with a craftsman's fidelity to the exactnesses. Then
he shook his head regretfully and tore the scrap of paper into tiny
squares, scattering them upon the brown flood surging past the
engine-room gangway.

"It won't do," he confessed reluctantly, as one who sacrifices good
literary material to a stern sense of the fitness of things. "It is
nothing less than a cold-blooded sacrilege. I can't make copy of her if
I write no more while the world stands."

VI

THE DECK-HAND

Charlotte Farnham's friends--their number was the number of those who
had seen her grow from childhood to maiden--and womanhood--commonly
identified her for inquiring strangers as "good old Doctor Bertie's
'only,'" adding, men and women alike, that she was as well-balanced and
sensible as she was good to look upon.

As Griswold had guessed, she stood but a single remove from an American
lineage much older than the America of the Middle West. Her father had
been a country physician in New Hampshire, migrating to the dry winters
of Minnesota for his young wife's health. The migration had been too
long postponed to save the mother's life; but it had made a beautiful
woman of the daughter, dowering her with the luxuriant physical charm
which is the proof that transplantation to fresher soil is not less
beneficial to human- than to plant-kind.

She had been spending the winter at Pass Christian with her aunt, who
was an invalid; and it was for the invalid's sake that she had decided
to make the return journey by river. Patient little Miss Gilman was the
least querulous of sufferers, but she was always very ill on a railway
train. Hence Charlotte, who was at once physician, nurse, mentor, and
dutiful kinswoman to the frail little lady who looked old enough to be
her grandmother, had chosen the longer, but less trying, route to the
far North.

So it had come about that their state-rooms had been taken on the _Belle
Julie_; and on the morning of the second