"Only up-stairs. I want to write to Emmie."
Ethan had been right: the storm was too violent to last. When it had spent itself he went down to the pier. Sky still a little overcast, but louder than ever the sea called to him.
He walked up and down, up and down. The salt blew keen in his face. By-and-by he went to the boat-house to consult Sam.
"Well," in Sam's opinion, "they mout be a bigger gale on the way, and then, again, they moutn't."
But after a while the warm wind seemed to blow the clouds low down on the threshold of the ocean. The dome of heaven was swept bare and clean except for a little corner of the west. And louder than ever the sea kept calling. He would go up to the house, he told Sam, and see what Mrs. Gano was doing—if she minded his going out for an hour.
She had written to Emmie a simple family letter, full of affection and reminders of the old days. "I hope you've forgiven me for being so horrid to you when we were children. You have the comfort of remembering you were always very gentle and forbearing to everybody. I was a monster. I'm still rather a monster, but I'd like you to go on thinking kindly of me."
She found she had no stamps, and looked in Ethan's room. His travelling letter-case—it was really a portable writing-stand—lay open on the floor of his dressing-room, with his bunch of keys in the lock.
"Careless boy," she said to herself, and went over to close it.
Her eye fell on the old note-book that Ethan had gone back for that day they left the Fort. She opened it idly. He had shown her the first pages himself, with their odds and ends of verse, jottings and subjects, etc. Absently she turned the leaves to the end. The last entry was the longest, the date early in that year: