"What are you doing, my good man?" she asked, coming near him, for she saw that he was in distress.
"Painting and caulking my old boat, miss," answered the fisherman, blotting out the last letters with a long smear of paint.
"But you are painting out the name?" said Maggie, inquiringly.
"I have a new name for the craft, miss," he answered, in a hoarse voice: "the 'Lone Star'; and I am painting out the old name, the Mary Mallow, which I gave her after my wife; but, saving your presence, miss, she desarted me these six months ago; I was too rough and common for her, I suppose."
He put his rough hand over his eyes. "It goes against my heart to paint her name out; but, as things are now, the 'Lone Star' is better."
Maggie could not help smiling at the unconscious poetry of the poor fellow and at the likeness between her lot and his.
"I am sorry for you, my man," she said, and she slipped a coin into his hand. "Put in a gilt star on the stern with this. It will be a comfort to you to have your boat smart." The man took the coin and looked at it vacantly. Maggie left him and kept on her way over the beach, past the boats and the drying nets, and the great heaps of seaweed and kelp, to the headland which jutted out into the sea beyond the village. Once there she seated herself in a deep recess of the cliff which commanded a view of the bay.
"And now I am alone, entirely alone, and I cannot be disturbed," she said to herself.
Down below her the breakers rolled in over the seaweed-covered rocks, and dashed into a deep chasm in the rocks, cleft by the attrition of ages, breaking with a dull sough upon the farthermost end of the cleft.
Maggie could see nothing from her perch but the sea, and the opposite cliff upon which Ripon House stood. A few wheeling sea-gulls, and a small fishing-boat, beating out of the harbor, were the only living objects in the view. The waves, crest over crest, hurried toward the headland, and beat into foam at her feet. Her mind was soothed by watching the torn waters, as each wave dashed out its life, in a thousand swirls and white bubbles of foam.