The rain had ceased, the sun had come out in all its majestic glory, and beneath its fervid kisses the mist that hid the ocean was melting into thin air. It bade fair to be a beautiful day, after all. The pearly rain-drops sparkled like diamonds on the leaves and flowers, the sky was blue and beautiful, with here and there a little white cloud sailing softly past. The day had began like many a life, in clouds and tears, but it promised to close in as fair and sweet a serenity as many an early-shadowed life has done. Howard involuntarily thought of the poet's beautiful lines: "Be still, sad heart, and cease repining, Behind the clouds is the sun still shining! Days of sunshine are given to all, Though into each life some rain must fall." He paused and looked around him. He found that he had come into the outskirts of another rude, little fishing village. A little ahead of him he could see the fishers bustling about on the shore. "I have come four miles, at least," he said to himself. "What a great, hulking, cowardly fellow I am to run that far from a woman's tears. Far better have stayed and tried to dry them. Um! She wouldn't have let me," he added, with a rueful second thought. Then, after a moment's idle gazing out at sea, aimlessly noting the flash of a sea-gull's wing as it wheeled in the blue air above him, he said, resolutely: "I'll go back, anyhow. Perhaps I can do something to help them. They are but women--my countrywomen, too, and I'll not desert them in their trouble, even though _she_ does hate me." He turned around suddenly to return, and the fate that was watching him to prevent such a thing, placed a simple stone in the way. He stepped upon it heedlessly, his ankle turned, and, with a sharp cry of pain, Howard fell to the ground. He made an effort to rise, but the acute pains that suddenly darted through his ankle caused him to fall back upon the wet sand in a hurry. "Umph! my ankle is evidently master of the situation," he thought, with an expression of comical distress. Raising himself on his elbow, he shouted aloud to the men in the distance, and presently two of them came running to his assistance. "I have sprained my ankle," he explained to them in their native tongue. "Please assist me to rise, and I will try to walk." But when they took him by the arms and raised him up, they found that it was impossible for him to walk. "This is a deuced bore at the present time, certainly," complained the sufferer. "Can you get me any kind of a trap to drive me back to the village yonder?" The peasants looked at him stupidly, and informed him carelessly that there was nothing of the kind available. Only one man in the vicinity owned a horse, and it had sickened and died a week before. Howard felt a great and exceeding temptation to swear a very small oath at this crisis, but being too much of a gentleman to yield to this wicked whisper of the evil one, groaned very loudly instead.