The December wind wailed over the stormy sea, and the wintry rain lashed the windows of the Dover Cottage. Marian Fletcher sat before the blazing fire in a long, low, gloomy parlor, and Capt. Craymore stood before her. He had but just found her out, and he had run down to see how she bore her altered fortunes. She bore them as an uncrowned queen might, with regal pride and cold endurance. The exquisite face had lost its rose-leaf bloom; the deep, still eyes looked larger and more fathomless; the mouth was set in patient pain—that was all. The man felt his heart burn as he looked at her, she was so lovely, so lovely. He leaned over, and the passionate words came that he could not check. He loved her. She loved him; she was forsaken and alone—why need they part?
She listened, growing whiter than a dead woman. Then she came and faced him, until the cowered soul within him shrank and quailed.
"I have fallen very low," she said. "I am poor, and alone, and a deserted wife. But Capt. Craymore, I have not fallen low enough to be your mistress. Go!"
Her unflickering finger pointed to the door. There was that in her face no man dare disobey, and he slunk forth like a whipped hound. Then as on that night when she had parted from her husband, she slipped down in her misery to the ground, and hid her face in her hands. Now she knew the man she had loved, now she was learning to know the man who had loved her. The one would drag her down to bottomless depths of blackness and infamy; the other had given up all for her—even herself—and gone forth a homeless, penniless wanderer, to fight the battle of life.
"Oh! truest and noblest!" her heart cried, in its passionate pain, "how I have wronged you! Bravest and best heart that ever beat in man's breast—am I only to know your worth when it is too late?"
It seemed so. Richard Fletcher had disappeared out of the world—the world she knew—as utterly as though he had never been in it. The slow months dragged drearily by; but he never came. The piteous advertisement in the Herald newspaper stood unanswered when the spring-buds burst; and she was alone in her worse than widowhood, in the Dover Cottage still.
With the glory of the brilliant new summer, new hope dawned for her. A tiny messenger, with Richard Fletcher's great brown eyes, smiled up in her face, and a baby head nestled against her lonely heart. Ah! she knew now how she loved baby's father, when the brown eyes, of which these were the counterpart, were lost to her forever.
So, with the great world shut out, and with only baby Richard and her two servants, life went on in the solitary cottage. The winds of winter had five times swept over the ceaseless sea, and little Richard could toddle and lisp; and in Marian Fletcher's heart hope slowly died out. She had lost him through her own fault; he, to whom she had been bound in the mysterious tie of marriage, would never look upon her cruel face again.
She sat one stormy November night, thinking very sadly of the true heart and strong love she had cast away. Her boy lay asleep before the ruddy fire; the rain and wind beat like human things against the glass. She sat looking seaward, with weary, empty eyes, so desolate—so desolate, her soul crying out with unutterable yearning for the wanderer to come back.
As she stood there gazing sadly out at the wild night falling over the wild sea, her one servant came hurriedly into the room with startled affright in her eyes.