and that was all that was
said about the matter.

Trafford went out and sat down on the little wharf, and Noll lingered
in the doorway of his schoolroom, thinking that he had never seen
Uncle Richard act more strangely. Was he offended at what he had done
and was doing for the Culm people? he wondered. He looked out and saw
that his uncle had turned his face away, and was looking off upon the
sea with the same dreamy, thoughtful look which he had noticed in his
eyes of late. Noll would have given a great deal could he have known
his thoughts at that moment. To human eyes this grave and thoughtful
man, who sat on the wharf, was not a whit less the stern and gloomy
creature that he had been an hour before. Yet, all hidden from others'
gaze, and almost from his own consciousness, a sudden sense of regret
and of a great short-coming in himself had welled up through the crust
of his hardened heart. His heart had been deeply stirred, and now it
smote him. His thoughts took some such shape as this,--even while he
was looking with such apparent calmness upon the changing, shadowy
lights of the sea:--

"This boy has done more in this short summer for his fellow-men and
for his God than I have done in my whole forty years of life! Oh, what
a life mine has been!--all a wreck, a failure, a miserable waste! And
he? Why, in this short summer-time, and on this barren Rock, he has
made his very life a blessing to every one upon it. I suppose those
dirty, ignorant fishermen bless the day that brought him here. And I?
O Heaven! what a failure, what a failure! I've done the world no
good,--it's no better for my having lived in it,--it would miss me no
more than one of these useless pebbles which I cast into the sea. And
this boy--_my_ boy--always at work to make others rejoice that he was
born into the world!"

For all the calmness and repose that was on his face, he longed to cry
out. Oh! was there no deliverance? Might not these long wasted years
yet be paid for by deeds of mercy and charity? But where was there a
deliverer? and who could tell how many years of good deeds and charity
could pay for forty years of wasted ones?

CHAPTER XX.

NEW THOUGHTS AND NEW PLANS.

Noll, sitting in the doorway, was presently aroused from a little
reverie into which he had fallen by hearing a voice call, "Noll, my
boy, come here." He obeyed the call, and started for the little wharf,
half expecting that Uncle Richard was about t