ay it was an odd fashion of mourning for him. And I could
not do without the window, you know. I can watch all the brigs come in;
and I can smell the shipping smell that I have loved all the days of my
life; and I can see the lads heaving, and climbing, and furling, and
mending their bits of canvas, and hauling their flags up and down. And
then who can say?--the sea never took him, I think--I think I shall hear
his voice before I die. For they do say that God is good."

Bebee, sweeping very noiselessly, listened, and her eyes grew wistful and
wondering. She had heard the story a thousand times; always in different
words, but always the same little tale, and she knew how old Annemie was
deaf to all the bells that tolled the time, and blind to all the
whiteness of her hair and all the wrinkles of her face, and only thought
of her sea-slain lover as he had been in the days of her youth.

But this afternoon the familiar history had a new patheticalness for her,
and as the old soul put aside with her palsied hand the square of canvas
that screened the casement, and looked out, with her old dim sad eyes
strained in the longing that God never answered, Bebee felt a strange
chill at her own heart, and wondered to herself,--

"What can it be to care for another creature like that? It must be so
terrible, and yet it must be beautiful too. Does every one suffer like
that?"

She did not speak at all as she finished sweeping the bricks, and went
down-stairs for a metal cruche full of water, and set over a little
charcoal on the stove the old woman's brass soup kettle with her supper
of stewing cabbage.

Annemie did not hear or notice; she was still looking out of the hole in
the wall on to the masts, and the sails, and the water.

It was twilight.

From the barges and brigs there came the smell of the sea. The sailors
were shouting to each other. The craft were crowded close, and lost in
the growing darkness. On the other side of the canal the belfries were
ringing for vespers.

"Eleven voyages one and another, and he never forgot to tie the flax
to the mast," Annemie murmured, with her old wrinkled face leaning out
into the gray air. "It used to fly there,--one could see it coming up
half a mile off,--just a pale yellow flake on the wind, like a tress of
my hair, he would say. No, no, I could not go away; he may come to-night,
to-morrow, any time; he is not drowned, not my man; he was all I had, and
God is good, they say."