They walked on together, and everywhere the children looked up from the excitement and laughter of their games to glance at them interestedly or disinterestedly, curiously or with indifference, and here and there they caught a smile, fleeting and momentary, fashioned expressly for them, inviting them to share the instant’s joy. As they walked they drew closer together. They were no longer blissfully happy, moving in a thoughtless perfection of shared and reciprocated love. They were intelligently happy, perceptively, hopefully happy. To the delight of the moment and of each other was added the delight of anticipation. They walked on and looked down the long vista of the future. Their love had now a meaning and a purpose for both of them that transcended the dear comradeship and pleasure of the present. It was still love, but it was not the same love; it had in it a sense of obligation, an instinct of fidelity, a passion of service, an element of devotion. In a little village church they knelt together, reverently, before the altar, and the same prayer was in both their hearts. PART FOUR I Her oldest child, a boy, was fourteen when Mrs. Guy Vanton lost her husband. They had lived together for a little more than fifteen years. The newspapers of those years contain nothing to show or suggest what may have been wrong in their lives. If there was anything it did not show outwardly. In the files of the Patchogue _Advance_, to be sure, the patient searcher might come upon a record of the death of Keturah Hand, only sister of John Smiley and a life-long resident of Blue Port. The article referred to her as the widow of Hosea Hand, who had lost his life three years earlier in an endeavour to save seamen from the wreck of a three-masted schooner, the _Sirius_. The _Advance_ did not recall the details of this tragedy, no doubt because they were familiar to almost all its readers. Hosea Hand, with a rope about his waist, had gone into a maelstrom of pounding surf at the foot of the sand dunes, a maelstrom in which several dark bundles of what appeared to be water-soaked clothing were clashing about. The bundles were human flotsam, three poor devils washed from the rigging of the _Sirius_. Before Hosea Hand could lay hold of a single one a big piece of floating timber, part of the ship’s fence, struck him. He never recovered consciousness after being hauled inshore. The tragedy had its effect on Keturah Hand in a perceptible loss of the rude vigour which had always characterized her. She failed very fast.