Mona glanced sometimes at Danny's listless face as they walked together along the shore with the child between them. His look was dull and at certain moments even silly. Once she thought she saw a tear glistening in his eye, but he had turned his head away in an instant. There were moments when her heart bled for him. People thought her harsh and even cynical. "Aw, allis cowld and freezin' is the air she keeps about her," they would say. Perhaps some bitter experience of the past had not a little to do with this. Nothing so sure to petrify the warmer sensibilities as neglect and wrong. But in the presence of Danny's silent sorrow the girl's heart melted, and the almost habitual upward curve at one corner of her mouth disappeared. She knew something of his suffering. She could read it in her own. At some thrilling moment, if Heaven had so ordered it, they two, she and this simple lad, might have uncovered to the other the bleeding wound that each carried hidden in the breast. And that great moment was yet to come, though she knew it not. Love is a selfish thing, let us say what we will of it besides. "Danny," said Mona, "have you seen anything more of Christian?" "Yes," said the lad. Some momentary remorse on Mona's part compelled her to glance into Danny's face. There was no trace of feeling there. It was baffled love, and not jealousy, that had taken the joy out of Danny's life. And as yet the lad had not once reflected that if Mona did not love him it was, perhaps, because she loved another. "He isn't going," continued Danny. "Thank God," said Mona, fervently. "And Kisseck, does he still mean to go?" "Ay, of coorse he's going. It'll be to-morrow, it seems. I'm to go, too." "Danny, you must not go," said Mona, dropping Ruby's hand to take hold of the lad's arm. He glanced up vacantly. "Seems to me it doesn't matter much what I do," he said. "But it does matter, Danny. What these men are attempting is crime--black, cruel, pitiless crime--murder, no less." "That's what the young masther was sayin'," answered the lad, absently; "and the one of them hadn't a word to say agen it." Ruby had tripped away for a moment. Returning with a little oval thing in her hand, she cried, "Danny, what's this? I found it under a stone, and its gills were shining like fire." "A sea-mouse," said the lad, and taking it out of the child's hand, he added, "I'm less nor this worm to our Bill." "Danny, would it hurt you much if you were to hear that your uncle Kisseck was being punished?" The lad lifted his eyes with a bewildered stare. The idea that Bill Kisseck could be punished had never really come to him as within the limits of possibility. Once, indeed, he had thought of something that he might himself do, but the wild notion had vanished with the next glance at Kisseck's face. "He could be punished," said Mona, "and must be."