The tide was coming in. Each wave broke a little higher upon the thirsting shore. Far out on the water was a tiny dark object that moved slowly shoreward on the crests of the waves. Barbara stood up, shading her eyes with her hand, and waited, counting the rhythmic pulse-beats that brought it nearer.
She could not make out what it was, for it advanced and then receded, or paused in a circling eddy made by two retreating waves. At last a high wave brought it in and left it, stranded, at her feet.
A Fragment
Barbara laughed aloud, for, broken by the wind and wave and worn by tide, a fragment of one of her crutches had come back to her. The bit of flannel with which she had padded the sharp end, so that the sound would not distress her father, still clung to it. She wondered how it came there, never guessing that it was but the natural result of Eloise's attempt to throw it as far as Allan had thrown the other, the day he took them away from her.
A great sob of thankfulness almost choked her. Here she stood firmly on her own two feet, after twenty-two years of helplessness, reminded of it only by a fragment of a crutch that the sea had given back as it gives up its dead. She had outgrown her need of crutches as the tiny creatures of the sea outgrow their shells.
| "Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, |
| As the swift seasons roll! |
| Leave thy low-vaulted past! |
| Let each new temple, nobler than the last, |
| Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, |
| Till thou at length art free, |
| Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!" |
The beautiful words chanted themselves over and over in her consciousness. The past, with all its pain and grieving, fell from her like a garment. She was one with the sun and the morning; uplifted by all the world's joy.
The True Lover
Her blood sang within her and it seemed that her heart had wings. All of life lay before her—that life which is made sweet by love. She felt again the ecstasy that claimed her in the Tower of Cologne, when she and the Boy, after a lifetime of waiting, had rung all the golden bells at once.