rom a dream.
She looked at the boat again, and the men preparing it, and then at
Caius--straight in his eyes she looked, as if searching his face for
something more.

"Follow your own conscience, Josephine; it is truer than ours. I was
wrong to let you be tempted," he said. "Forgive me!"

She looked again at the boat and at the sea, and then, in the stayed
subdued manner that had become too habitual to her, she said to O'Shea:

"I will go home now. Dr. Simpson is right. I cannot go."

O'Shea was too clever a man to make an effort to hold what he knew to be
lost; he let go her rein, and she rode up the path that led to the
island road. When she was gone O'Shea turned upon Caius with a look of
mingled scorn and loathing.

"Ye're afraid of Le Maitre coming after ye," he hissed; "or ye have a
girl at home, and would foind it awkward to bring her and madam face to
face; so ye give her up, the most angel woman that ever trod this earth,
to be done to death by a beast, because ye're afraid for yer own skin.
Bah! I had come to think better of ye."

With that he cut at the horse with a stick he had in his hand, and the
creature, wholly unaccustomed to such pain and indignity, dashed along
the shore, by chance turning homeward. Caius, carried perforce as upon
the wings of the wind for half a mile, was thrown off upon the sand. He
picked himself up, and with wet clothes and sore limbs walked to his
little house, which he felt he could no longer look upon as a home.

He could hardly understand what he had done; he began to regret it. A
man cannot see the forces at work upon his inmost self. He did not know
that Josephine's soul had taken his by the hand and lifted it up--that
his love for her had risen from earth to heaven when he feared the
slightest wrong-doing for her more than all other misfortune.

CHAPTER IX.

"GOD'S PUPPETS, BEST AND WORST."

All that long day a hot sun beat down upon the sea and upon the ice in
the bay; and the tide, with its gentle motion of flow and ebb, made
visibly more stir among the cakes of floating ice, by which it was seen
that they were smaller and lighter than before. The sun-rays were doing
their work, not so much by direct touch upon the ice itself as by
raising the temperature of all the flowing sea, and thus, when the sun
went down and the night of frost set in, the melting of the ice did not
cease.

Morning came, and revealed a long blue channel across the bay from its