Lion leaned his shaggy mane caressingly against her, and while she patted his black head with her white, jeweled hand, the steamer touched the wharf, landed a solitary passenger, and moved on majestically upon its way. Nina Strangemore looked up after a minute, gave a smothered sigh, and turned back to her dog. “Ah, Lion, my good dog, it is the same old story, ‘He cometh not,’” she said; and the magnificent animal gave a piteous whine, as if he comprehended the full measure of her wistful disappointment. He fell to licking her hands and gazing up at her with his dumb, affectionate eyes full of a mute sympathy that was almost painful to its recipient. She pushed him almost pettishly from her, and looked out again at the wide sea and the fast receding ship. “How they come and go over the water like white-winged birds,” she sighed, with a patient sorrow in her voice. “Ah, me, will they never bring Talbot home?” A sound, a step! She turned with a start. A gentleman was coming along the level sands toward her--a tall, bronzed, handsome man, whose eyes lingered upon her with startled, irrepressible admiration. She met his gaze, and the rich color flew into her cheeks, and the light of a sudden, supreme happiness flashed into her great dark eyes. She made a few steps toward him, then quickly checked herself, and stood waiting with a bounding pulse and wildly beating heart. The stranger came nearer, lifted his hat with courteous grace to the solitary girl, and passed on, followed by a low, inquiring growl from Lion, who did not quite know whether to regard him as friend or enemy. But Nina Strangemore gazed like one petrified after the retreating form, and when it had passed from her sight, she knelt down upon the wet sands, put her arms around Lion’s black mane, and hid her white face there. “Oh, Lion, Lion,” she sobbed, in an abandon of girlish sorrow. “He is home at last! Talbot, my husband, and he did not speak to me; he did not even remember me, his little Nina, his loving girl-wife! Oh, what shall we do, Lion, old fellow?” CHAPTER III. SKETCHING THE PAST. While she kneels there desolately on the cold wet sands, we will briefly sketch her past for you, reader. She was an heiress, this dark-eyed girl sobbing there as forlornly as if she had not a friend on earth. She had houses and land and gold, but all her vast possessions had not kept her life from being sad and lonely, for she was an orphan, and she had neither kith nor kin save a sour maiden aunt who lived with her in lonely state at the great house up yonder on the high bluff. Five years ago she had been Nina Selwyn, a spoiled little girl of thirteen years, the idol of her father and her gentle step-mother, for Nina’s own mamma had died when her first-born was a toddling baby. Mr. Selwyn had mourned her devoutly for five years, and then he married a beautiful young widow with one son, Talbot Strangemore.