I did exactly as she said. And it all came true. When the captain saw me, he started back and exclaimed,—"What sent you here?"
I said, "An angel."
"And an angel told me you were coming," he replied.
Active work saved me. For years I never dared rest. I shrank back from a leisure hour as from a dark chasm.
The greater part of my life has been passed upon the sea. As I approached middle age, people would joke me upon my single life. They could never know what a painful chord they struck, and I could never tell them. Beautiful girls were pointed out to me. I could not see them. Margaret's face always came between.
This bantering a single man is very common. I often wonder that people dare do it. How does the world know what early disappointment he may be mourning over? Is it anything to laugh about, that he has nobody to love him,—nobody he may call his own,—no home? Seated in your pleasant family-circle, the bright faces about him fade away, and he sees only a vision of what might have been. Yet nobody supposes we have feeling. No mother, dressing up her little boy for a walk, thinks of our noticing how cunning he looks, with the feather in his hat. No mother, weeping over the coffin of her child, dreams that we have pity and sorrow in our hearts for her.
Thus the world shuts us out from all sympathy with its joys or afflictions. But the world doesn't know everything,—least of all what is passing in the heart of an old bachelor.
Jamie and Mary are old folks now. He never went to sea after his marriage. Father set him up in a store. I should make it my home with them, but they live at the old place, and I am always better away from there.