in front of French Joe's fish-house. This was the life that she
had always known.

Across the harbour, on a fir-fringed headland, stood Dalveigh. John
Cameron, childless millionaire, had built a summer cottage on that
point two years ago, and given it the name of the old ancestral estate
in Scotland. To the Racicot fishing folk the house and grounds were
as a dream of enchantment made real. Few of them had ever seen
anything like it.

Nora Shelley knew Dalveigh well. She had been the Camerons' guest many
times that summer, finding in the luxury and beauty of their
surroundings something that entered with a strange aptness into her
own nature. It was as if it were hers by right of fitness. And this
was the life that might be hers, did she so choose.

In reality, her choice was already made, and she knew it. But it
pleased her to pretend for a little time that it was not, and to dally
tenderly with-the old loves and emotions that tugged at her heart and
clamoured to be remembered.

Within, in the low-ceilinged living room, with its worn, uneven floor
and its blackened walls hung with fish nets and oilskins, four people
were sitting. John Cameron and his wife were given the seats of honour
in the middle of the room. Mrs. Cameron was a handsome, well-dressed
woman, with an expression that was discontented and, at times,
petulant. Yet her face had a good deal of plain common sense in it,
and not even the most critical of the Racicot folks could say that she
"put on airs." Her husband was a small, white-haired man, with a
fresh, young-looking face. He was popular in Racicot, for he mingled
freely with the sailors and fishermen. Moreover, Dalveigh was an
excellent market for fresh mackerel.

Nathan Shelley, in his favourite corner behind the stove, sat lurching
forward with his hands on his knees. He had laid aside his pipe out of
deference to Mrs. Cameron, and it was hard for him to think without
it. He wished his wife would go to work; it seemed uncanny to see her
idle. She had sat idle only once that he remembered--the day they had
brought Ned Shelley in, dank and dripping, after the August storm ten
years before. Mrs. Shelley sat by the crooked, small-paned window and
looked out down the harbour. The coat she had been patching for her
husband when the Camerons came still lay in her lap, and she had
folded her hands upon it. She was a big woman, slow of speech and
manner, with a placid, handsome face--a face that had