call it, with as good a relish as the best; wouldn't have liked to stand inside the old cathedrals, and see the sunbeams swimming up aloft in the roof, and the doves flying in and out and building their little indifferent nests in the carvings made by fingers dust a thousand years ago; wouldn't have liked to look at the great paintings, as if he were in a vision; to have walked through the old halls were history happened for you mustn't take it for granted that my Bert is an ignoramus because he earns his livelihood in hard work and exposure. I don't know the more finished gentleman than he, if you want the truth. There is an education better than books, and you can't learn at colleges all my Bert knows. Latin and Greek I grant you, and you're welcome-for the use of dead men's tongues, who did no good with them while they had them, and heathen barbarians at that, I've never been able to see; but whatever can be gained by the knowledge of men and of the round earth and sea and sky, the best learning that the world affords, my Bert has at his fingers' tips. A man can't bring into port a great French or British steamer, commanded by some captain next to a nobleman; or a man-of-war, commanded, maybe, by a nobleman himself, with all his courtly breeding, and a mind rich with the advantages of generations; or one of our own line-of-battle ships, with an old hero on the quarter deck; or a merchantman from the East Indies; a fruiter from the Levant, with Portuguese and Greeks before the mast; a South American, with hides and horns; a whaler from the pole; a little schooner, creeping up the coast with lime can't meet familiarly, as pilots do; welcomed with opened arms, and told by many a captain that they would rather see him than their wives-all these different sorts, without getting at the core of countries and races in a way that is like a liberal education. And Bert had always said that, if ever he was rich, we'd take passage for the other side, and for Vesuvius, and the Midnight Sun, and the Catacombs, and the Inquisition, and the Pyramids, and I don't know what all. But there! there's no hope of a pilot's being rich. I tell Bert that if ever they get rid of the laws that restrain them now, so that each pilot can ask his own price, and a ship in a gale refusing it, he can tell her to get in the best way she can, till she calls him back at any price, why, then he won't expose himself to being drowned and his children to being orphaned for a beggarly twenty or fifty dollars; but the great merchant princes, that own the ships and cargoes, will have to open their purses, and a pilot maybe

as well off as his neighbours. But Bert says that, once change those laws, decent men would leave the calling, pilotage would be piracy, the bay would be swarming with sharks and wreckers, and he would sooner turn longshoreman and sweep a crossing.

But all this has nothing to do with Bert's return; and as I was saying, there was nobody inside of that horizon happier than I that day.

But it was that day. Two or three days afterward, when the bright edge of relief and gratitude and pleasure had worn down the least in the world, I began, of course—or else it wouldn't have been I-to question a little, to worry, and wonder why it happened that Bert couldn't leave the steamer just that time, when he'd weathered so many worse gales; and all at once it leaked out, I don't know how or where, that Will Davenant's cousin Kate was aboard that steamer, just married to a rich old fellow who was doing the fashionable thing and taking her abroad. She was a bold and handsome hussy, always making eyes at Bert. And Bert hadn't mentioned her; and Will hadn't mentioned her-it never occurred to me that Will hadn't known of it, or that Bert hadn't seen her once all the way acrossand so I put two and two together, and wrought myself up to a frenzy, and there was an end of happiness. For from conjecture I crept to suspicion, and from suspicion I flew to certainty, and from certainty to desperation. went about my work slipshod, and glowering like a wild woman, and the dishes were half cooked, and the floors half swept and everything was rough with dust; the tins and the silver were tarnished and unscoured, the little woodfire was never lit in welcome at night, and the whole house was just as gloomy and cheerless as I felt myself; so that it must have made Bert groan to set his foot inside the door, and he would hardly have been to blame if he had slipped back to Liverpool, and had his merrymaking with the warm-hearted men over there, after all.

I

But Bert had married me for better or worse, and, though it was pretty much all worse, he was determined to make the best of it; and so he believed that this was all due to my weak nerves and ill health-which it wasn't, but only to a life of indulgence, and selfishness, and waywardness bearing fruit--and he humoured me, and waited on me, and was gentler with me than ever mother was in all her life. For mother came in one day, and found the plates not washed, and the fire gone out, and me sitting down at heel, sulking and wretched, with my hair uncombed, and no collar on; and

she declared on the spot that patience had had its perfect work with me, that all I needed was a good sound shaking, and if I wasn't too old to behave in that way, I wasn't too old to have it, and she had half the mind to give it to me; and such conduct, she said, had driven better men than Bert to drink. She was ashamed to own me for a child of hers, and I'd only have myself to thank if he went to the bad altogether. And up I flared, and said, if it wasn't gone to the bad already to have been chasing across the Atlantic after Kate Davenant, I should like to know what it was. I suppose the fact is that I must have been a little crazy. And just as mother turned round with the dishcloth suspended, and her mouth wide open, Bert, who had come in unnoticed in the high words, and had heard those high words, pushed open the door, and stood before me.

I shall never forget how Bert looked that moment. His face was as white and set as a dead man's. It would have looked like a dead man's if the awful living eyes hadn't been blazing out of it like two fires-so dark and terrible that I cowered.

"Say that again, Sady," said he.

And my heart bubbling up with anger at the tone, I said it again, and more of it too.

"I swear to you that this is the first I ever knew of her being on the steamer," said Bert then, in a great, grand voice that of itself seemed to wake me from my evil mood as if it had been a nightmare, though doubtless it was fear, calling the blood away from my brain, that waked me. He returned to my mother. "Take care of her," he said; "take good care of her. I must get down the harbour before the weather thickens. Maybe I shall never come up again. I hope I never shall!"

With that he paused and hesitated, and took a step forward and toward me; but Heaven only knows what imp of perversity caught my shoulder and twisted me round and away, and in a moment the door was closed gently, as Bert did everything in the house, and he was gone. And then you may imagine that chaos reigned in that room for an hour, with penitence and self-reproach and fear, and cries and sobs and hysteries, and sal volatile and hot shrub; and mother left off scolding and hushed me, and bathed my face, and combed my hair, afraid lest I'd do myself a mischief; and finally, as she couldn't stay, Nanny being threatened with the croup, and Neddy being just vaccinated and taking tremendously, she tied on my cloak and furs, and took a basket of things out of the bureau drawer, and locked up the doors, and slipped the key under

the stone, and hailed a car at the head of the street, and shoved me in, and carried me off to her own house-all in a vague, wild, cloudy state of mind, where nothing seemed to be real but a dull and universal ache, which, whether it belonged to my body or my soul, I had not wit enough to know. "I'm going to die," I said, looking out at the purple, leaden afternoon, and the dreary branches bending in the damp and bitter wind that soughed up the street openings like the cry of lost souls. "I'm going to die," I said. "I've begun already. My mind's all dim and dying first." So at last we reached the place, just as the first snowflakes began falling out of that cold and desolate sky, and mother got me into the house. What a busy bustling little body she was then! I can hardly realize it when I see her sitting there now, so gray-haired and white and silent, and watching Netty's twins as they tumble together on the floor, just like the cool of the day. And presently I was tucked up warm in bed, and falling off into strange, wild dreams, and waking out of them in terror every now and then.

And that night my baby was born. It was a furious storm outside as midnight drew on; hardly less furious within, as, in pauses of pain, I thought of Bert-his boat lying too far out in the bay, with the gale and the sleet fierce enough to cut the eyes out of his head if he looked to windward, or maybe run down without the hearing of a cry, by some great steamer in that weather, too thick with the driving snow to see a light or your own length ahead; or else dragging her anchor somewhere, parting cable and drifting on the rocks; and I remembered the wreck on Norman's Woe, where the spouting water leaped round the sailor lashed in the shrouds till he was encased and sealed in a mass of frozen ice, and a spar swinging round with a lurch of the wreck snapped him in two like a dead branch; and I thought, in swift succession, of all the horrid chances of those dark winter seas, till my brain was raging with heat, and all my words were delirious.

It was of no use their putting the little flannel bundle up on the pillow beside me and bidding me look at it; it was of no use the four pattering night-gowned imps, all waked and peeping in, at the risk of squills and opodeldoe, whispering and on tip-toe, wondering how it came there through all that storm, chuckling over a queer little sneeze that plainly told that it took cold in coming, and which the ridicu lous morsel gave with as much self-possession as if the whole atmosphere belonged to it, and scampering off to bed again with their happy

tongues subdued only till they were half out of hearing, and already quarrelling as to whether Neddy and Nanny were as much aunts and uncles as Natty and Netty; it was of no use their telling me here was the nicest baby ever born into this breathing world, and just to look at these tiny perfect fingers and that atom of an ear. What could I care for that and such as that? There were millions of babies in the world, but there was only one Bert, and I had driven him out into the whirling white tempest of that pitiless night; and every screaming blast, every push of the great shoulder of the gale against the house, made me start up and cry out.

But all at once I heard mother saying in an undertone, as if she had not said it half a dozen times before, that here was Bert's chin with all the pluck of it, if ever anything was, and she shouldn't wonder if the eyes-and, without waiting to hear her finish, it came over me, like a fresh tide of feeling and thought, that this was Bert's child after all; and if I never saw Bert again, yet, perhaps, the boy might grow up to be like his father; and I don't know what there was comforting in the idea, but I turned and laid my cheek down against his, and began to sink away quietly to sleep. And they darkened the room, and set the lamp outside in the next one, where mother went to busy herself about something or other; and presently the nurse was nodding, as I found when suddenly starting wide awake, not having really lost myself at all. What made me start wide awake then, with all my senses about me, as alert as ever I was in my life? I will tell

you.

The landing of the front stairs opened directly into the room where I lay; and, as if he had just come in the door, from off the sea, there, in his great storm-clothes, stood Bert.

What a white, fixed face it was he wore! Not the face which I had seen in the afternoon, but a deathly, ghastly face, that it chilled one's marrow to look at; and the hair was hanging wet about it, and around the eyes, that had an appalling, absent, vacant gaze, such as I had never seen in Bert's shining, splendid ones. "Oh, what is it, Bert?" I cried. "Don't be frightened, dear! It's all over, and I'm very well, and it's-it's a boy." Then I remembered how we had parted, and I whispered, half choked, imploring him to forgive me.

"I went home to find you, Sady," murmured he, in as hollow a tone as the whistle of the wind, "and I've been looking for you since, my darling. And so it's a boy, is it?" And he came and laid his cold, wet, rough face down

on mine, and on that little velvet cheek beside mine, and stood erect, and shuddered, and was gone-gone like the breaking of a bubble.

And with the outcry that I made the nurse sprang to her feet, and mother came running in; and they both declared what a pity I had waked, and what a sweet sleep I must have been having; and, of course, I had been dream ing; what preposterous nonsense to say I hadn't, for nobody else had seen Bert, as, indeed, where could he have come from in such a storm? And I just as stoutly maintained that they needn't try and deceive me, and Bert was in the house, for I had seen him, and they were doing me a great deal more harm by keeping him away than if they let him come in again. And then, as I detected them looking strangely at each other, I exclaimed again that I had not been asleep at all, and it was not his ghost that I had seen, for all their looks, but Bert himself; and, as they tried to soothe me, and laugh me out of the notion, and I saw they were in earnest, cold shivers began to rush over me, till they shook me as I lay. "He is drowned! he is drowned!" I sung out between my chatter ing teeth. "And I have done it. I have destroyed my husband!" And I raised such a ululu that presently mother took me in hand again severely, and told me that, whether I had destroyed my husband or not, I should certainly destroy my child by allowing myself to get into this condition; and if I didn't hush up at once, she would go out in the snow herself and fetch the doctor again, and give me a Dover's powder. And then, as the baby began to cry, she and the nurse made such a racket between them, with their shshshing and trotting and patting and stirring and sipping, that there was nothing for it but that I should be quiet. And, directly, their voices sounded miles away; and, thoroughly worn out, I went to sleep, and never waked till morning, when the storm had all blown up the coast, and the sun was shining brightly, and the sky was bluer than the sapphire in the high-priest's breastplate.

But I did not wake to suit the day. I opened my eyes with such wonder to see it so bright and careless, with such a load of heaviness, such vague regret that I had waked at all; and, of course, my first thought was Bert.

The storm had been a brief one, it seemed, sweeping swift and furious; possibly Bert's boat might have been beyond its belt, and have known but little of it. Yet that was hardly likely, and I tried to brace myself for the worst, and prayed-I don't know how long it was since I had said my prayers for strength