his speech. To her he was simply a wondrously honest man who loved truth
for itself, who could never utter anything not true, who held it no offense
to speak truth even of the dead. Gentle or simple, he seemed infinitely
superior to all men whom she had met with. And yet this beautiful nature
walked through the world quite alone. He had asked her to remember him when
he was gone; he had said that she was his friend. And he cared little for
women--there was perhaps no other woman in the world he had called a
friend. Then the girl's heart fluttered at the presumption of her silly,
soaring thoughts, and she glanced nervously to the right and to the left of
the lonely road, as though fearful that some hidden eavesdropper might peep
into her open mind. The magic spell was upon her. This little, pale, clever
man, so quiet, so strange, so unlike anything else within her seventeen
years of experience, had wrought Nature's vital miracle, and Joan, who,
until then, believed herself in love with her sailor sweetheart, now stood
aghast before the truth, stood bewildered between the tame and bloodless
fantasy of her affection for Joe Noy and this wild, live reality. She
looked far back into a past already dim and remembered that she had told
Joe many times how she loved him with all her heart. But the words were
spoken before she knew that she possessed a heart at all. Yet Joe then
formed no inconsiderable figure in life. She had looked forward to marriage
with him as a comfortable and sufficient background for present existence;
she had viewed Joe as a handsome, solid figure--a man well thought of, one
who would give her a home with bigger rooms and better furniture in it than
most fishermen's daughters might reasonably hope for. But this new blinding
light was more than the memory of Joe could face uninjured. He shriveled
and shrank in it. Like St. Michael's Mount, seen afar, through curtains of
rain, Joe had once bulked large, towering, even grand, but under noonday
sun the great mass dwindles as a whole though every detail becomes more
apparent; and so with poor Joe Noy. Removed to a distance of a thousand
miles though he was, Joan had never known him better, never realized the