“And yet, after all, Kate, I realize that my work is mere child’s play. Just see what other men have had to face. At Minot’s Ledge, you know,—the light off Boston,—they had to chisel down a submerged rock into steps, to get a footing for the tower. But three or four men could work at a time, and then at dead low water. They got only one hundred and thirty hours’ work the first year. The whole Atlantic rolled in on top of them, and there was no shelter from the wind. Until they got the bottom courses of their tower bolted to the steps they had cut in the rock, they had no footing at all, and had to do their work from a small boat. Our artificial island helps us immensely; we have something to stand on. And it was even worse at Tillamook Rock, on the Pacific coast. There the men were landed on a precipitous crag sticking up out of the sea, from breeches buoys slung to the masthead of a vessel. For weeks at a time the sea was so rough that no one could reach them. They were given up for dead once. All that time they were lying in canvas tents lashed down to the sides of the crag to keep them from being blown into rags. All they had to eat and drink for days was raw salt pork and the rain-water they caught from the tent covers. And yet those fellows stuck to it day and night until they had blasted off a place large enough to put a shanty on. Every bit of the material for that lighthouse, excepting in the stillest weather, was landed from the vessel that brought it, by a line rigged from the masthead to the top of the crag; and all this time, Kate, she was thrashing around under steam, keeping as close to the edge as she dared. Oh, I tell you, there is something stunning to me in such a battle with the elements!” Kate’s cheeks burned as Sanford talked on. She was no longer the dainty woman over the coffee-cups, nor the woman of the world she had been a few moments before, eager for the pleasure of assembled guests. Her eyes flashed with the intensity of her feelings. “When you tell me such things, Henry, I am all on fire,” she cried. Then she stopped as suddenly as if some unseen hand had been laid upon her, chilling and shriveling the hot burning words. “The world is full of such great things to be done,” she sighed, “and I lead such a mean little life.” Sanford looked at her in undisguised admiration. Then, as he watched her, his heart smote him. He had not intended to wound her by his enthusiasm over his own work, nor to awaken in her any sense of her own disappointments; he had only tried to allay her anxieties over his affairs. He knew by the force of her outburst that he had unconsciously stirred those deeper emotions, the strength of which really made her the help she was to him. But he never wanted them to cause her suffering.