, he realized
that such an alliance would be but a lifelong slavery for Mona. To mate
a poetic soul like hers, that heard the voice of eternity in the
white-crested billows, the footsteps of angels in the music he drew from
his violin, and the whisper of God in the sea winds that murmured
through the spruce thickets they visited, as he knew she did, seemed as
unnatural as confining one of the white gulls that circled about the
island in a coop with the barnyard fowls.

To Mona herself no thought of this had come. Though the young men with
whom as schoolmates she had studied, and who now as fishermen, with
ill-smelling garb and sea-tanned hands and faces, often sought her, to
none did she give encouragement, and with none found agreeable
companionship. What her future might be, and with whom spent, gave her
no concern. Each day she lived as it came, helping her mother in the
simple home life and the making of their raiment, stealing away
occasionally to spend a few hours with Uncle Jess, or in summer to hide
herself in the Devil's Oven, and play on the violin he had given her, or
practise with him as a teacher. This violin and its playing, it must be
stated, had been and was the only bone of contention between Mona and
her mother, and just why that mother found it hard to explain, except
that it was a man's instrument and not a woman's. Their humble parlor
boasted a small cottage organ. "Let Mona learn to play on that," she had
said when Jess first began to teach Mona the art of the bowstrings,
"it's more graceful for a girl to do that than sawing across a fiddle
stuck under her chin." And this matter of grace, so vital to that
mother's peace of mind, was the only point of dispute between them. But
Uncle Jess sided with Mona, and the mother gave in, for with her, for
many potent reasons, the will and wishes of Uncle Jess must not be
thwarted, even if wrong. However, the dispute drove Mona and the fiddle
out of the house, and when she had finally mastered it (at least in a
measure), it stayed out.

In this connection, it may be said, there was also a difference in
opinion between Mrs. Hutton and Jess regarding the future of Mona, and
though never discussed before her, for obvious reasons, it existed. With
Mrs. Hutton the measure of her own life, or what it had been, as well as
that of her neighbors, was broad enough for Mona.

"It's going to spoil her," she asserted on one of these occasions, "this
getting the idea int