"Yes, dada! All about them--their names and probable color, probable weight, everything we can think of!" And then she went back and looked long out over the vast gray, pathless expanse. "'The sea is His, and He made it!' What inconceivable power! And yet that mighty Creator noted the fall of a sparrow. Oh!" she thought, as she pressed the jewel to her breast till it hurt the tender flesh. "I--who am widowed for all my life--I thank you for your mercy and goodness in bringing safe and happy deliverance to my beloved sister! And humbly I beseech you now, to deliver me my soul! For I am a sinful woman--troubled and heavy, for that we lost our way through love! But now I cannot bear my woe alone! Help me, O mighty and powerful One, hereafter to live according to Thy will! Purify me in heart and mind, that I may be a fit companion for those little ones you have sent into our lives!" She, too, began to feel a longing for sight and touch of those precious mysteries--Dorrie's babies. Stewart had been so anxious for Dorothy's welfare. She pressed her locket closer. "Oh!" she thought, "how I will love them! Sybil Letitia--Dorothy Grace! Yes, you are very nice and stately, and will look well upon the records, and, later on, upon marriage cards; but, dear little gifts, you will answer, all your baby years at least, to the tenderly commonplace Sybbie and Dorrie, so familiar to a Lawton nursery, and will doubtless be as hardy, happy, and sturdy as Lawton-Galt babies ought to be! And oh, if you thrive and are spared to the years of your sweet budding, you shall, by your right divine, be taught frankly and by high authority those great truths that are too often learned only in degrading secrecy from unworthy lips. Do I not know the danger, the cruelty, of sending forth the young in the innocence of utter ignorance! But you, my Dorrie's little daughters, shall be taught to look forward to some proud day in your girlhood when, as a guerdon for patient waiting and unhesitating obedience, you shall receive from reverent lips knowledge of the mysteries of life and love--of the almost divine honor of a perfectly pure womanhood! So shall propinquity be as naught; so no moment of strange, overwhelming weakness, no sudden flaring up of impulse, shall have power to bewilder and confuse you, to your harm! And thus, knowing something of both your weakness and your strength, it will not be in the innocence of ignorance that you will face the world, but with the clear-eyed, pure-hearted innocence of wisdom!" * * * * * Just then Sybil's skirts snapped in the wind, and whipped close about her ankles. "Oh!" she exclaimed. "Papa! I must go to papa!" She smiled faintly as she thought, "While he has been waiting the babies have grown up into lovely womanhood."