was considerate
for his feelings. She avoided speaking of her desire for a ship to
arrive. Occupied with their daily tasks, they never broached the
subject. When he went up the hill to attend to the fire he was always
alone, and she tactfully selected a time when he was occupied about the
encampment to make her daily climb to Mount Hope.

What if help did not come? Could they--he and she--go on forever living
together like this? She was an intelligent girl. She knew that the
present relations between herself and Armitage were artificial, and
based wholly upon the conventions of organized society. But they were
unnatural relations, contrary to the laws of nature. In her heart she
knew that she cared more for this strange, silent man than she dared to
admit. Yes, he was the man of her day-dreams, the man she had waited
for, the man she could love. She did not ask what he had been. She only
knew him as he was. She loved him for what he was. He was poor, he was
not what the world calls of gentle birth, yet he had qualities that in
her eyes raised him above all men more favored by fortune. He was one of
nature's noblemen. Some great secret sorrow had wrecked his life, but it
had not taken from him his sweetness of character, his beauty of face
and mind, his manly courage, his courtesy to a lonely, helpless woman.
She loved the rich tones of his voice, the sad, wistful gaze in his fine
eyes when they looked silently into hers. She knew of what he was
thinking. She knew the dread that was on his heart--the dread of a
misfortune a hundred times worse than any that had yet embittered his
life. The dread that one day, sooner or later, the ship would come to
carry away from him forever the woman who had once more made life seem
worth living.

One morning Grace was sitting sewing, deftly plying the fish-bone needle
which Armitage had made for her. She was making a desperate effort to
patch up, for the hundredth time, her old battered ball-dress, which
now, reduced to shreds, scarcely covered her decently. Armitage, no
better off as regards attire, was stretched out on the sands near her,
watching her work. It was a domestic scene. Any stranger chancing to
pass that way would have taken them for a young married couple, the man
evidently a fisherman, the woman, his wife, doing the household mending.
A short distance away was their cabin, and on the fire close by the iron
saucepan in which a savory mess was cooking for their noonday