The surf at this point, even in pleasant weather, sounded a constant roar, and in times of storm it increased to a deafening thunder that appalled the ear and made the heart tremble before the sea in its savage ferocity. Looking off to the right, perhaps the greater part of a mile distant, the harbor discovered itself, blue, bluer than the sky. A few vessels that had grown mysteriously upon the empty horizon, and come in over the vast waste of waters, were idly lying at anchor, each one biding her time to spread her sails in the breeze and recede upon her lonely course, going, as she had come, like some spirit of solitude, dropping down silently beyond the remote sea-reaches. There the Nereid swung herself gently over the long ground-swell, patiently awaiting the coming night when again to take up her watery track that would carry her over the great Atlantic to other lands and far-off harbors. Not a trimmer ship sailed the high seas. The sun had traveled almost down the western slope, and it lit up the mighty ocean with a splendor that burned in lances of flame along the waves, and floated in myriad rainbows over the surf. The pomp of the departing day passed across the boundless waters, a magnificent pageantry. As the sun went down, the sky became a scarlet canopy. The flying spray took up the color and spread out a thousand streamers to the wind. Long, gold-green lanes of sea ran out to where the distant mists let down their gorgeous drapery. The tireless gulls, shaking the red light from their wings, sailed and sailed and dipped and sailed again. A few fishing smacks loitered in the orange haze, and, leagues away, a single sloop in the humid north stood, like some wan water-wraith, with a garland of foam about its feet. Eastward, above the hills, the waiting moon hung her helmet, paler than pearl, and the land, transfigured by the evening light, looked on while the sea in its play flashed up a hundred hues. The widow Aber had lived there on the cliff and seen the tides ebb and flow for more now than the quarter of a century. She was not a young girl when, twenty-six years back, poor Jacob Aber had married her. It was a sudden fancy on his part and a great surprise to the place, for Jacob was well on towards fifty, and many a girl had set her cap to catch the handsome sailor in vain. But he never rued his bargain. He was not a rich man, because he had always been a generous man, and he was content with enough merely to bring him in a modest living. When he married he took what little he had and built this cottage, built it of brick good and strong, where he could feel the salt wind blow, right in the face of the sea—the sea that, until he met Miriam Drew with her soft gray eyes, he had loved better than every thing else in all the wide world.