"No! When I found you could not raise the money, I gave him my share in the mine. With that as a consideration, he made you the loan. You are not angry, are you?"
"Angry!" Emerson's tone conveyed a supreme gladness. "You don't know—how happy you have made me."
"Hark!" She laid a finger upon his lips. Through the breathless night there came the faint rumble of a ship's chains.
"The Grande Dame!" he cried. "She sails at the flood tide."
They stood together in the open doorway of the little house and watched the yacht's lights as they described a great curve through the darkness, then slowly faded into nothingness down the bay. Cherry drew herself closer to Boyd.
"What a wonderful Providence guides us, after all," she said. "That girl had everything in the world, and I was poor—so poor—until this hour. God grant she may some day be as rich as I!"
Out on The Grande Dame the girl who had everything in the world maintained a lonely vigil at the rail, straining with tragic eyes until the sombre shadows that marked the shores of the land she feared had shrunk to a faint, low-lying streak on the horizon. Then she turned and went below, numbed by the knowledge that she was very poor and very wretched, and had never understood.