“Mary,” asked Keturah Hand as she leaned forward while her niece adjusted the pillows behind her in the big Pullman chair, “when that man refused the jewels you told him that you would offer another ransom for Guy Vanton. What had you in mind?” The younger woman was behind her aunt. Mrs. Hand twisted about suddenly to see her face. It was flushed, but Mermaid’s deep and brilliant eyes met her aunt’s unflinchingly. “I would have married Guy,” she said, her voice vibrating slightly. “His father--that is, that man--talked about saving him. I would have matched my salvation of him against his--father’s. I would have fought for him against all the past evil that was dragging him down. Now his father is dead. He can--possibly--pull himself out alone, unaided. If not, I am ‘standing by.’ Oh, yes--I love him,” she finished, answering the interrogation that leaped from Keturah Hand’s eyes. VIII In the sunshine of California, in the cheerfulness of life in San Francisco, Keturah grew steadily better. Dick Hand executed a variety of projects, and only Mermaid remained unstirred and uninfluenced by her surroundings, by the change of air and scene. It is perhaps wrong to speak of her as “unstirred.” She was stirred and very deeply, but by no trifle of environment or of company. Down in her the great tides were swinging, moving resistlessly and in vast volume, imperceptible in their drift and direction on the surface. As was inevitable, Dick Hand again asked her to marry him and this time she gave him a final refusal. She did not put him off. She knew it would be useless. The current had set and was sweeping on through her. She could chart it, and she knew it would not shift. Something tremendous, something massive in her life would be required to deflect it. “Why,” she asked herself, “should I pretend to myself any longer? I love Guy Vanton. I think I have always loved him. He is in peril and he needs my help. When he was caught in the surf did I wait to see if he could save himself? Not one instant! Why do I wait now? Why do I risk losing him, by letting him drown, forever? It isn’t right.” She did up her hair in great coils, like thick cables of ship’s rope, and it seemed to her that each separate strand, so slender, so easily snapped, redoubled in its tensile power as it was gathered with the hundreds of others. “Life,” she thought to herself, “is like that. We are tied to the past by a thousand filaments, every one of them slight, fragile, easily snapped, quickly broken. But they are all twisted together. They are like this coil of hair. They are like a thousand threads spun together, not to be snapped, not to be broken. A thousand things join Guy to the past. Some of the threads join the two of us.” A fresh thought struck her. “He can never escape wholly from his past. And I am almost the only thing or person in it that is pleasant or even halfway wholesome for him to remember.”