ped her desires
toward her daughter. Romance had no place in Mrs. Hutton's nature,
neither had love of music. In her calendar, also, one man was as good as
another if he behaved himself as well, and a present lover for Mona, if
he meant business and could provide a home, was far better than an
absent one, even if the entire island cried his praises.

So she favored young Moore and, in the many ways a mother can, gave him
opportunities.

But to Mona, sensitive, half heart-broken, and unable to escape this new
infliction, it was inexpressible misery.

So the days and weeks went by, and the snow came to whiten Rockhaven
ledges, the billows thundered unceasingly against them, and the little
harbor became frozen over.

And sometimes, in the hours of bitterest desolation, Mona thought of the
old tide mill and the girl who had once gone there to end her heart
hunger.

CHAPTER XXXIX

A GRAY-HAIRED ROMANCE

There had been a time in the long ago of Rockhaven's history when Jess,
then a bashful young man, had loved pretty Letty Carver, now the Widow
Hutton. It had started in her school days, when they romped barefoot
along the sandy shore of the harbor, played about the old tide mill,
whose wheels then rumbled with each ebb and flow, or gathered shells on
the bits of beach between the island cliffs. When the epoch of spelling
school and walk home from Thursday evening prayer meetings came, it was
Letty whom Jess always singled out, and though she now wore shoes, he
was not always so fortunate. But the little bond of feeling was none the
less entrancing; and when later Jess sailed away to the Banks on his
first fishing trip, he carried a lock of Letty's jet-black hair as a
token, and her sweet face was ever present in his thoughts. When he
returned, browned but successful, her welcome seemed to grow in warmth;
and after two or three voyages, and he could now afford a Sunday suit
when he visited her, gossip whispered they were likely to make a match.
By this time he had begun to build the usual air-castles of youth, and
though his took the shape of a humble dwelling, nestling amid the
abutting cliffs in front of which Rockhaven stood, it was none the less
a palace to him, with Letty to be its future queen.

And then the war came on and Jess, partly from patriotism, a little from
love of adventure, and more to earn the liberal bounty his country
offered, enlisted in the navy. Had he been a trifle less bashful and
s