half furtively, as if waiting for her to speak; but Mellony's head was not turned from the open window, and she was utterly silent. At last this immobility had a sympathetic effect upon the mother, and she seated herself not far from the girl, her hands, with their prominent knuckles and shrunken flesh, folded in unaccustomed idleness, and waited, while in the room dusk grew to dark. To Mellony the hour was filled with suggestions that emphasized and defined her misery. In her not turbulent or passionate nature, the acme of its capacity for emotional suffering had been reached. Hitherto this suffering had been of the perplexed, patient, submissive kind; to-night, the beauty of the softly descending gloom, the gentle freedom of the placid harbor, the revolt of her usually yielding lover, deepened it into something more acute.

"Mellony," said her mother, with a touch of that timidity which appeared only in her speech with her daughter, "did you count on going over to the Neck to-morrow, as you promised?"

"I'll never count on doing anything again," said Mellony, in a voice she tried to make cold and even, but which vibrated notwithstanding,—"never, so long as I live. I'll never think, or plan, or—or speak, if I can help it—of what I mean to do. I'll never do anything but just work and shut my eyes and—and live, if I've got to!" Her voice broke, and she turned her head away from the open window and looked straight before her into the shadowed room. Her mother moved uneasily, and her knotted hands grasped the arms of the stiff chair in which she sat.

"Mellony," she said again, "you've no call to talk so."

"I've no call to talk at all. I've no place anywhere. I'm not anybody. I haven't any life of my own." The keen brutality of the thoughtlessness of youth, and its ignoring of all claims but those of its own happiness, came oddly from the lips of submissive Mellony. Mrs. Pember quivered under it.

"You know you're my girl, Mellony," she answered gently. "You're all I've got."

"Yes," the other answered indifferently, "that's all I am,—Mellony Pember, Mrs. Pember's girl,—just that."

"Ain't that enough? Ain't that something to be,—all I plan for and work for? Ain't that enough for a girl to be?"

Mellony turned her eyes from emptiness, and fixed them upon her mother's face, dimly outlined in the vagueness.

"Is that all you've been," she asked, "just somebody's daughter?"

It was as if a heavy weight fell from her lips and settled upon her mother's heart. There was a silence. Mellony's eyes, though she could not see them, seemed to Mrs. Pember to demand an answer in an imperative fashion unlike their usual mildness.

"It's because I've been,—it's because I'd save you from what I have been that I—do as I do. You know that," she said.

"I don't want to be saved," returned the other, quickly and sharply.

The older woman was faced by a situation she had never dreamed of,—a demand to be allowed to suffer! The guardian had not expected this from her carefully shielded charge.

"I want you to have a happy life," she added.

"A happy life!" flashed the girl. "And you're keeping me from any life at all! That's what I want,—life, my own life, not what anybody else gives me of theirs. Why shouldn't I have what they have, even if it's bad now and then? Don't save me in spite of myself! Nobody likes to be saved in spite of themselves."

It was a long speech for Mellony. A large moon had risen, and from the low horizon sent golden shafts of light almost into the room; it was as if the placidity of the night were suddenly penetrated by something more glowing. Mellony stood looking down at her mother, like a judge. Mrs. Pember gazed at her steadily.

"I'm going to save you, Mellony," she said, her indomitable will making her voice harsher than it had been, "whether you want to be saved or not. I'm not going to have you marry, and be sworn at and cuffed." Mellony moved to protest, but her strength was futility beside her mother's at a time like this. "I'm not going to have you slave and grub, and get blows for your pains. I'm going to follow you about and set wherever you be, whenever you go off with Ira Baldwin, if that'll stop it; and if that won't, I'll try some other way,—I know other ways. I'm not going to have you marry! I'm going to have you stay along with me!"

With a slight gesture of despair, Mellony turned away. The flash had burned itself out. The stronger nature had reasserted itself. Silently, feeling her helplessness, frightened at her own rebellion now that it was over, she went out of the room to her own smaller one, and closed the door.

Mrs. Pember sat silent in her turn, reviewing her daughter's resentment, but the matter admitted no modifications in her mind; her duty was clear, and her determination had been taken long ago. Neither did she fear anything like persistent opposition; she knew her daughter's submissive nature well.

Brought up in a country village, an earnest and somewhat apprehensive member of the church, Mrs. Pember had married the captain early in life, under what she had since grown to consider a systematic illusion conceived and maintained by the Evil One, but which was, perhaps, more logically due to the disconcerting good looks and decorously restrained impetuosity of Captain Pember himself. Possibly he had been the victim of an illusion too, not believing that austerity of principle could exist with such bright eyes and red cheeks as charmed him in the country girl. At least, he never hesitated subsequently, not only to imply, but to state baldly, a sense of the existence of injury. Captain Phippeny was one of those sailors whom the change of scene, the wide knowledge of men and of things, the hardships and dangers of a sea life, broaden and render tolerant and somewhat wise. Pember had been brutalized by these same things.

The inhabitants of Grayhead were distinguished by the breadth and suggestiveness of their profanity, and Captain Pember had been a past master of the accomplishment. Praise from Sir Hubert Stanley could have been no more discriminating than the local acknowledgment of his proficiency in this line. No wonder Mrs. Pember looked back at the ten years of her married life with a shudder. With the rigid training of her somewhat dogmatic communion still potent, she listened in a horrified expectancy, rather actual than figurative, for the heavens to strike or the earth to swallow up her nonchalant husband. Nor was this all. The weakness for grog, unfortunately supposed to be inherent in a nautical existence, was carried by Captain Pember to an extent inconsiderate even in the eyes of a seafaring public; and when, under its genial influence, he knocked his wife down and tormented Mellony, the opinion of this same public declared itself on the side of the victims with a unanimity which is not always to be counted upon in such cases.

In fact, her married life had, as it were, formalized many hitherto somewhat vague details of Mrs. Pember's conception of the place of future punishment; and when her husband died in an appropriate and indecorous fashion as the result of a brawl, he continued to mitigate the relief of the event by leaving in his wife's heart a haunting fear, begotten of New England conscientiousness, that perhaps she ought not to be so unmistakably glad of it. It was thus that, with Mellony's growth from childhood to womanhood, the burning regret for her former unmarried state, whose difficulties had been mainly theological, had become a no less burning resolve that her child