“Oh, of course you will,” said the sympathizing voice beside him.

“I don’t know,” said Andrew again, more slowly and reflectively.  “I’ve the idea—­and I can’t say how I got it—­that there’s some condition or other attached to my promotion—­that there’s something Mr. Maurice means that I shall do, and if I don’t do it I don’t get my lift.  It can’t be anything about wages:  I don’t know what it is!”

“Perhaps,” said Louie, innocently, and without a glimpse of the train her thoughtless words fired—­“perhaps he means for you to marry Frarnie!” laughing a little laugh at the absurd impossibility.

And Andrew started as if a bee had stung him, and saw it all.  But in a moment he only drew Louie closer, and kissed her more passionately, and sat there caressing her the more tenderly while they listened to a thrush that had built in the garden thicket, mistaking it for the wood, so near the town’s edge was it, and so still and sunny was the garden all day long with its odors of southernwood and mint and balm; and he delayed there longer, holding her as if now at least she was his own, whatever she might be thereafter.

As he walked home that night, and went and sat upon the wharf and watched the starlit tide come in, he saw it all again, but with thoughts like a procession of phantoms, as if they had no part even in the possible things of life, and were indeed nothing to him.  How could they have any meaning to him—­to him, Louie’s lover?  What would the whole world be to him, what the sailing of the Sabrina, without Louie?  And then a shiver ran across him:  what would Louie be to him without the sailing of the Sabrina! for that, indeed, as he had said, was the top of his ambition, and that being his ambition, perhaps ambition, was as strong with him as love.

But with this new discovery on Andrew’s part of Mr. Maurice’s desires, Andrew could only recall circumstances, words, looks, hints:  he could not shape to himself any line of duty or its consequences:  enough to see that Mr. Maurice fancied his simple and thoughtless attentions to Frarnie to be lover-like, and, approving him, looked kindly on them and made his plans accordingly; enough to see that if he should reject this tacit proffer of the daughter’s hand, then the Sabrina was scarcely likely to be his; and that in spite of such probability, the first and requisite thing in honor for him to do was to tell Mr. Maurice of his marriage engagement with Louie, and then, if the man had neither gratitude nor sense enough to reward him for his assistance in saving the brig, to trust to fortune and to time, that at last makes all things even.  As he sat there listening to the lapping of the water and idly watching the reflected stars peer up and shatter in a hundred splinters with every wash of the dark tide, he could not so instantaneously decide as to whether he should make this confession or not.  “What business is it of Maurice’s?” he said to