"Be still, sad heart, and cease repining,
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining!
Days of sunshine are given to all,
Though into each life some rain must fall."
He paused and looked around him. He found that he had come into the outskirts of another rude, little fishing village.
A little ahead of him he could see the fishers bustling about on the shore.
"I have come four miles, at least," he said to himself. "What a great, hulking, cowardly fellow I am to run that far from a woman's tears. Far better have stayed and tried to dry them. Um! She wouldn't have let me," he added, with a rueful second thought.
Then, after a moment's idle gazing out at sea, aimlessly noting the flash of a sea-gull's wing as it wheeled in the blue air above him, he said, resolutely:
"I'll go back, anyhow. Perhaps I can do something to help them. They are but women—my countrywomen, too, and I'll not desert them in their trouble, even though she does hate me."
He turned around suddenly to return, and the fate that was watching him to prevent such a thing, placed a simple stone in the way. He stepped upon it heedlessly, his ankle turned, and, with a sharp cry of pain, Howard fell to the ground.
He made an effort to rise, but the acute pains that suddenly darted through his ankle caused him to fall back upon the wet sand in a hurry.
"Umph! my ankle is evidently master of the situation," he thought, with an expression of comical distress.
Raising himself on his elbow, he shouted aloud to the men in the distance, and presently two of them came running to his assistance.