Helen did not answer the cable message. A hundred hindrances might have prevented her; yet he had believed she would. He thought of her ardent, womanly candor, her beautiful courage, her noble trust. It did not occur to him that a woman has two natures, this for the unfortunate and that for the fortunate lover. One he had tasted; the other he had yet to know. He vibrated restlessly to and fro between Windover and Boston, where his presence was urgently required in the settlement of his uncle’s affairs. A snowstorm set in, and increased to a gale. Ten days passed, somehow. The steamer was due in twenty-four hours. She did not arrive. Bayard had lived in Windover long enough to acquire the intelligent fear of the sea which characterizes the coast; and when the next day went, and another, and the boat was admitted at headquarters to be three days overdue, he suffered the unspeakable. It had been nothing less than a terrible midwinter gale. Wrecks lined the coast; glasses scoured it; watchers thronged it; friends besieged the offices of the steamship company. The great line which boasted that it had never lost a life held its stanchest steamer three days--four days overdue. It was like him that he did not overlook his duty in his trouble, but stood to his post, and remembered the little service appointed for that most miserable evening when he was expected to be with his people. Those who were present that night say that the scene was one impossible to forget. Looking more like death than life, the preacher prayed before them “to the God of the sea.” Now, for the first time, he felt that he knew what Windover could suffer. Now the torment of women all their lives watching for returning sails entered into his soul; those aged men looking for the sons who never came back; the blurred eyes peering off Windover Point to see the half-mast flag on the schooner as she tacked up the bay; the white lips that did not ask, when the boat came to anchor, “Which is it?” because they dared not--all this, now, he understood. His personal anguish melted into the great sum of misery in the seaport town. “If she comes back to me,” he thought, “how I shall work for them--my poor people!” Now, for the first time, this devout, unselfish man understood that something else than consecration is needed to do the best and greatest thing by the human want or woe that leans upon us. Now that he took hold on human experience, he saw that he had everything to learn from it. The knowledge of a great love, the lesson of the common tie that binds the race together--these taught him, and he was their docile scholar. Five days overdue!... Six days. Bayard had gone back to Boston, to haunt the offices and the docks. Old friends met him among the white-lipped watchers, and a classmate said:-- “Thank God, Bayard, _you_ haven’t wife and child aboard her.” He added:-- “Man alive! You look like the five days dead!” Suddenly, the stir ran along the crowd, and a whisper said:--