"Nothing----Well, no matter. I'm fanciful, maybe. There's an old saying in the family about him, some Doctor's prophecy, and it makes me over-watchful, likely." She waited for a question. I asked none. There was a dull throb of pain in my heart, but I thrust it down. The girl waited a few moments, debating with herself: I could read the struggle on her face: then she looked up straight into my eyes, her small white teeth showing determined as a steel-trap. "It's quiet here, Mrs. Manning, and will be for a bit, and there's a story I'd like to tell you. It would do me good, if it were off my mind. Perhaps you, too," with a sharp glance. "Go on." She put her hand into her pocket and pulled out a broken morocco case. "Look here. This tells the whole of the story, almost,"--holding it where the light from the cabin-window fell on it. It was the daguerreotype of a woman: one of those faces that grow out of a torpid, cunning, sensual life; apparently marked, too, by some strange disease, the skin white, and hanging loose from the flesh. I pushed it away. Jacqueline polished it with her palm. "She was an opium-eater, you see? The eyes have that rigid staring, like Death looking into life. You pushed it from you, Mrs. Manning?"--shutting it. "Yet I know a man who cherished that living face tenderly in his bosom for fifteen long years, and never opened his lips to say to God once that it was hard to bear: faugh!" and she flung the case into the water. "I only kept it to show you. She, the foul vampire, sucked his youth away. I think it was but the husk of life that was left him when she died;--and we are making that mean and poor enough,"--in a lower voice. "Yet that man"--more firmly--"has a stronger brain and fresher heart than you or I are fit to comprehend, Mrs. Manning. One would think God meant that the last of his life, after that gone, should be a warm Indian-summer day, opening broad and happily into the life He is keeping for him,--would you not?" "Who is the man?"--my lips growing cold. "Your husband." "I thought so. You did well to tell me that story." She looked from me, her color coming and going. "It was hard to do it. You are an older woman than I. But I thought it was needed." I looked up at the hard-set, chubby little face, beyond at the far yellow night-line of sea, listened to the low choke, choke, of the water in the wheels. "I wish you would leave me. Let me be alone awhile." She went to the other end of the deck, where she could keep me in sight. It was so dull, that throb of the water, playing some old tune that would not vary! The sea stretched out in such blank, featureless reaches! To nestle down into this man's heart and life! To make his last years that warm Indian-summer day! I could do it! I! What utter rest there were in that!