“You don’t know anything about it.  You have never had a son,” said Thyra, cruelly enough, for she knew that Carl’s sonlessness was a rankling thorn in his mind.  “You don’t know what it is to pour out your love on one human being, and have it flung back in your face!”

Carl could not cope with Thyra’s moods.  He had never understood her, even in his youth.  Now he went home, still shrugging his shoulders, and thinking that it was a good thing Thyra had not looked on him with favor in the old days.  Cynthia was much easier to get along with.

More than Thyra looked anxiously to sea and sky that night in Avonlea.  Damaris Garland listened to the smothered roar of the Atlantic in the murky northeast with a prescience of coming disaster.  Friendly longshoremen shook their heads and said that Ches and Joe would better have kept to good, dry land.

“It’s sorry work joking with a November gale,” said Abel Blair.  He was an old man and, in his life, had seen some sad things along the shore.

Thyra could not sleep that night.  When the gale came shrieking up the river, and struck the house, she got out of bed and dressed herself.  The wind screamed like a ravening beast at her window.  All night she wandered to and fro in the house, going from room to room, now wringing her hands with loud outcries, now praying below her breath with white lips, now listening in dumb misery to the fury of the storm.

The wind raged all the next day; but spent itself in the following night, and the second morning was calm and fair.  The eastern sky was a great arc of crystal, smitten through with auroral crimsonings.  Thyra, looking from her kitchen window, saw a group of men on the bridge.  They were talking to Carl White, with looks and gestures directed towards the Carewe house.

She went out and down to them.  None of these who saw her white, rigid face that day ever forgot the sight.

“You have news for me,” she said.

They looked at each other, each man mutely imploring his neighbor to speak.

“You need not fear to tell me,” said Thyra calmly.  “I know what you have come to say.  My son is drowned.”

“We don’t know that, Mrs. Carewe,” said Abel Blair quickly.  “We haven’t got the worst to tell you—­there’s hope yet.  But Joe Raymond’s boat was found last night, stranded bottom up, on the Blue Point sand shore, forty miles down the coast.”

“Don’t look like that, Thyra,” said Carl White pityingly.  “They may have escaped—­they may have been picked up.”

Thyra looked at him with dull eyes.

“You know they have not.  Not one of you has any hope.  I have no son.  The sea has taken him from me—­my bonny baby!”

She turned and went back to her desolate home.  None dared to follow her.  Carl White went home and sent his wife over to her.

Cynthia found Thyra sitting in her accustomed chair.  Her hands lay, palms upward, on her lap.  Her eyes were dry and burning.  She met Cynthia’s compassionate look with a fearful smile.