The woman had been the plague spot of Lower Carmody and Carmody
Harbour for a generation. In the earlier days of his ministry to the
congregation he had tried to reclaim her, and Naomi had mocked and
flouted him to his face. Then, for the sake of those to whom she was
a snare or a heart-break, he had endeavoured to set the law in motion
against her, and Naomi had laughed the law to scorn. Finally, he had
been compelled to let her alone.

Yet Naomi had not always been an outcast. Her girlhood had been
innocent; but she was the possessor of a dangerous beauty, and her
mother was dead. Her father was a man notorious for his harshness and
violence of temper. When Naomi made the fatal mistake of trusting to a
false love that betrayed and deserted, he drove her from his door with
taunts and curses.

Naomi took up her quarters in a little deserted house at Spruce Cove.
Had her child lived it might have saved her. But it died at birth, and
with its little life went her last chance of worldly redemption. From
that time forth, her feet were set in the way that takes hold on hell.

For the past five years, however, Naomi had lived a tolerably
respectable life. When Janet Peterson had died, her idiot daughter,
Maggie, had been left with no kin in the world. Nobody knew what was to
be done with her, for nobody wanted to be bothered with her. Naomi Clark
went to the girl and offered her a home. People said she was no fit
person to have charge of Maggie, but everybody shirked the unpleasant
task of interfering in the matter, except Mr. Leonard, who went to
expostulate with Naomi, and, as Janet said, for his pains got her door
shut in his face.

But from the day when Maggie Peterson went to live with her, Naomi
ceased to be the harbour Magdalen.

The sun had set when Mr. Leonard reached Spruce Cove, and the harbour
was veiling itself in a wondrous twilight splendour. Afar out, the
sea lay throbbing and purple, and the moan of the bar came through the
sweet, chill spring air with its burden of hopeless, endless longing and
seeking. The sky was blossoming into stars above the afterglow; out
to the east the moon was rising, and the sea beneath it was a thing of
radiance and silver and glamour; and a little harbour boat that went
sailing across it was transmuted into an elfin shallop from the coast of
fairyland.

Mr. Leonard sighed as he turned from the sinless beauty of the sea and
sky to the threshold of Naomi Clark's hous