“Let me have the sweetness of your leaning on me always, let me take care of you, comfort you when you are tired, laugh with you when you are glad, and love you until death and even after, as he loved her.

“Tell me you care, Barbara, even if it is only a
little.  Tell me you care, and I can wait, a long,
long time.

“ROGER.”

Barbara’s heart sang with the joy of the morning.  She opened the little worn book, with its yellow, tear-stained pages, and read it all, up to the very last line.

“Oh!” she cried aloud, in pity.  “Oh! oh!”

Fully understanding, she put it aside, closing the faded cover reverently on its love and pain.  Then she turned to Roger’s letter, and read it again.

[Sidenote:  First Flush of Rapture]

Dreaming over it, in the first flush of that mystical rapture which makes the world new for those to whom it comes, as light is recreated with every dawn, she took no heed of the passing hours.  She did not know that it was very late, nor that Aunt Miriam, much worried, had asked Roger to go in search of her.  She knew only that love and morning and the sea were all hers.

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.

[Sidenote:  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.