g and
the sea were all hers.

The tide was coming in. Each wave broke a little higher upon the
thirsting shore. Far out on the water was a tiny dark object that moved
slowly shoreward on the crests of the waves. Barbara stood up, shading
her eyes with her hand, and waited, counting the rhythmic pulse-beats
that brought it nearer.

She could not make out what it was, for it advanced and then receded, or
paused in a circling eddy made by two retreating waves. At last a high
wave brought it in and left it, stranded, at her feet.

[Sidenote: A Fragment]

Barbara laughed aloud, for, broken by the wind and wave and worn by
tide, a fragment of one of her crutches had come back to her. The bit of
flannel with which she had padded the sharp end, so that the sound would
not distress her father, still clung to it. She wondered how it came
there, never guessing that it was but the natural result of Eloise's
attempt to throw it as far as Allan had thrown the other, the day he
took them away from her.

A great sob of thankfulness almost choked her. Here she stood firmly on
her own two feet, after twenty-two years of helplessness, reminded of it
only by a fragment of a crutch that the sea had given back as it gives
up its dead. She had outgrown her need of crutches as the tiny
creatures of the sea outgrow their shells.

"Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!"

The beautiful words chanted themselves over and over in her
consciousness. The past, with all its pain and grieving, fell from her
like a garment. She was one with the sun and the morning; uplifted by
all the world's joy.

[Sidenote: The True Lover]

Her blood sang within her and it seemed that her heart had wings. All of
life lay before her--that life which is made sweet by love. She felt
again the ecstasy that claimed her in the Tower of Cologne, when she and
the Boy, after a lifetime of waiting, had rung all the golden bells at
once.

And the Boy was Roger--always had been Roger--only she did not know.
Into Barbara's heart came something new and sweet that she had never
known before--the deep sense of conviction and the everlasting peace
which the True Lov