t, though credulous, aunt, to lend him the money he
needed, but when he left for his new field of labor, he had so impressed
her with his newly acquired delusion that she made haste to call upon
Weston & Hill and invest a few thousand herself.

How disastrous that venture proved and how much woe and sorrow followed
need not be specified at present. True to her feminine nature, she told
no one, not even Winn, of her investment; and until the meteoric career
of Rockhaven had become ancient history on the street, only the books of
those shrewd schemers and her own safe deposit box knew her secret.

CHAPTER IV

WHERE THE SEA-GULLS COME

Like a pair of Titanic spectacles joined with a bridge of granite, the
two halves of Rockhaven faced the Atlantic billows, as grim and defiant
as when Leif Ericson's crew of fearless Norsemen sailed into its
beautiful harbor. With a coast line of bold cliffs, indented by
occasional fissures and crested with stunted spruce, the interior,
sloping toward the centre, hears only the whisper of the ocean winds.

Rockhaven has a history, and it is one filled with the pathos of
poverty, from that day, long ago, when Captain Carver first sailed into
its land-locked harbor to split, salt, and dry his sloop load of cod on
the sunny slope of a granite ledge, until now, when two straggling
villages of tiny houses, interspersed with racks for drying cod, a few
untidy fishing smacks tied up at its small wharves, and a little
steamboat that daily journeys back and forth to the main land, thirty
miles distant, entitles it to be called inhabited. In that history also
is incorporated many ghastly tales of shipwreck on its forbidding and
wave-beaten shores, of long winters when its ledges and ravines were
buried beneath a pall of snow, its little fleet of fishermen
storm-stayed in the harbor, and food and fuel scarce. It also has its
romantic tales of love and waiting to end in despair, when some fisher
boy sailed away and never came back; and one that had a tragic ending,
when a fond and foolish maiden ended years of waiting by hanging herself
in the old tide mill.

And, too, it has had its religious revival, when a wave of Bible reading
and conversion swept over its poorly fed people, to be followed by a
split in its one Baptist church on the merits and truths of close
communion or its opposite, to end in the formation of another.

It also had its moods, fair and charming when the warm south wi