, hurt as it will. I never had much hope of getting you to
listen to me, so there's no great disappointment there. You're too
good for me--I've always known that. A girl that is fit to mate with
the Camerons is far above Rob Fletcher, fisherman."

"I never had such a thought," protested Nora.

"I know it," he said, casing himself up in his quietness again. "But
it's so--and now I've got to lose you. But there'll never be any other
for me, Nora."

He left her at her father's door. She watched his stalwart figure out
of sight around the point, and raged to find tears in her eyes and a
bitter yearning in her heart. For a moment she repented--she would
stay--she could not go. Then over the harbour flashed out the lights
of Dalveigh. The life behind them glittered, allured, beckoned. Nay,
she must go on--she had made her choice. There was no turning back
now.

* * * * *

Nora Shelley went away with the Camerons, and Dalveigh was deserted.
Winter came down on Racicot Harbour, and the colony of fisher folk at
its head gave themselves over to the idleness of the season--a time
for lounging and gossipping and long hours of lazy contentment smoking
in the neighbours' chimney corners, when tales were told of the sea
and the fishing. The Harbour laid itself out to be sociable in winter.
There was no time for that in summer. People had to work eighteen
hours out of the twenty-four then. In the winter there was spare time
to laugh and quarrel, woo and wed and--were a man so minded--dream, as
did Rob Fletcher in his loneliness.

In a Racicot winter much was made of small things. The arrival of Nora
Shelley's weekly letter to her father and mother was an event in the
village. The post-mistress in the Cove store spread the news that it
had come, and that night the Shelley kitchen would be crowded. Isobel
Shelley, Nora's younger sister, read the letter aloud by virtue of
having gone to school long enough to be able to pronounce the words
and tell where the places named were situated.

The Camerons had spent the autumn in New York and had then gone south
for the winter. Nora wrote freely of her new life. In the beginning
she admitted great homesickness, but after the first few letters she
made no further mention of that. She wrote little of herself, but she
described fully the places she had visited, the people she had met,
the wonderful things she had seen. She sent affectionate messages to
all her