"Why," cried the girl smiling again, "I’d never fight with Ralph at all if they didn’t try to make us marry. I wonder if it is so, that Aunt Ida and Ralph’s uncle were once fond of each other! If they could not make a match of it, why are they so determined to force Ralph and me into a marriage?" "Mebbe because they see their mistake," Miss Heppy said judiciously. "I don’t believe your aunt and Henry Endicott have been any too happy endurin’ these past twenty-odd years." "Tell me!" urged the girl, her cheeks aglow and her eyes dancing. "Is remaining single all your life such a _great_ cross, Miss Heppy? Are there not some compensations?" The woman looked up from darning the big blue wool sock that could have fitted none but her brother’s foot. The smile with which she favored the girl had much tenderness as well as retrospection in it. "I don’t believe that any woman over thirty is ever single from choice, Lorny. She may never find the man she wants to marry. Or something separates her from the one she is sure-’nough fitted to mate with. So, she must make the best of it." "But _you_, Miss Heppy?" asked Lorna, boldly. "Why didn’t you ever marry?" "Why—I _was_ cal’lating on doing so, when I was a gal," said the woman gently. "Listen!" The girl, startled, looked all about the room and then back into Miss Heppy’s softly smiling face. "Do you hear it, Lorny? The sea a-roaring over the reef and the wind wailing about the light? That’s my answer to your question. I seen so many women in my young days left lone and lorn because of that sea. Ah, my deary, ’tain’t the men that go down to the sea in ships that suffer most. ’Tis their wives and mothers, and the little children they leave behind. "When I was a young gal I never had a chance to meet ary men but them that airned their bread on the deep waters. My father was drowned off Hatteras, two brothers older than Tobias were of the crew of the windjammer, _Seahawk_. She never got around the Horn on her last v’y’ge. In seventeen homes about Clinkerport and Twin Rocks, the women mourned their dead on the _Seahawk_. "No, no. I didn’t stay single from choice. But I shut my ears and eyes to ary man that heard the call of the sea. And I never met no other, Lorny." The uproar of the storm was an accompaniment to Miss Heppy’s story. The solemnity of it quenched any further expression of what Lorna Nicholet considered her troubles. Within the kitchen there was silence for a space. CHAPTER III THE APEX OF THE STORM Bedtime came, and Miss Heppy led Lorna, with the little whale oil hand lamp, up one flight of the spiral stairway and ushered her into the best bedroom. It was the whitewashed cell facing the ocean.