With only a limited education, such as the island schools afforded, a scant knowledge of books, since but few ever reached Rockhaven, a love of music that amounted to a passion, no knowledge of the world except that gleaned from Uncle Jess, a deep religious feeling, partially shaped by the "Hardshell" Baptist teachings of the Rev. Jason Bush, and more by the ocean billows that forever thundered against the island shores, she was at twenty a girl to be pitied by those capable of understanding her nature or realizing how incompatible to it was her environment. Of music she knew but little, and that taught her by the genial old soul who, since her babyhood, had been father, uncle, and companion. His constant assistance had been hers through her pinafore days at school; his genial philosophy and keen insight into human impulse had done more to develop her mind afterward than the three R's she mastered there. His gentle hand had taught her the scales on his old brown fiddle, and now that she had reached that mystic line where girlhood ends and womanhood begins, her future was of more concern to him than all else in his life. That she must and would, in the course of human nature, love and marry, he fully expected; that it was like to be a mateship with some of the simple and hard-working fishermen's sons, he expected; and yet, with dread for her far more than any one else, even her mother, he realized that such an alliance would be but a lifelong slavery for Mona. To mate a poetic soul like hers, that heard the voice of eternity in the white-crested billows, the footsteps of angels in the music he drew from his violin, and the whisper of God in the sea winds that murmured through the spruce thickets they visited, as he knew she did, seemed as unnatural as confining one of the white gulls that circled about the island in a coop with the barnyard fowls.