sweetheart an honest kiss!” And Andrew, doubting if the minister were not behind the door and he should not find himself married out of hand, irresolute, cowardly, too weak to give up the Sabrina and that sweet new title just ringing in his ears, was pushed along by Mr. Maurice’s foolish, hearty hand till he found himself bending over Frarnie with his arm around her waist, his lips upon her cheek, and without, as it seemed to him, either choice or volition on his part.  But as he looked up and saw the portraits of the girl’s grandfathers, where they appeared to be looking down at him stern and questioning, a guilty shame over the wrong he was doing their child smote him sorely:  he saw that he had allowed the one instant of choice to slip away; the sense came over him that he had sealed his own doom, while a vision of Louie’s face, full of desolation and horror, was scorching in upon his soul; and there, in the moment of betrothal, his punishment began.  He stole down to the Sabrina’s wharf that evening, after the moon had set, and looking round to see that it was quite forsaken at that hour, he took from his neck a long, slender hair-chain to drop over into the deep water there; but as he held the thing it seemed suddenly to coil round his hand with a caress, as if it were still a part of Louie’s self.  He stamped his foot and ground his heel into the earth there with a cry and an oath, and put the chain back again whence he had taken it, and swore he would wear it till they laid his bones under ground.  And he looked up at the dark lines of the brig looming like the black skeleton of an evil thing against the darkness of the night, and he cursed himself for a traitor to both women—­for a hypocrite, a craven, a man sold to the highest bidder.  Well, well, Captain Traverse, there are curses that cling!  And Louie sat in the gloom at the window of the fisherman’s cottage down below the town, and sighed and wondered and longed and waited, but Captain Traverse went back to the Maurices’ mansion.

* * * * *

It is one of the enigmas of this existence how women forgive the wrong of such hours as came to Louie now—­hours of suspense and suffering—­hours of a misery worse than the worm’s misery in blindness and pain before it finds its wings.

At first she expected her lover, and speculated as to his delay, and fretted to think anything might detain him from her; and now she was amazed, and now vexed, and now she was forgiving the neglect, accusing herself and making countless excuses for him; and now imagining a thousand dire mishaps.  But as the third day came and he was still away—­he who had been always wont to seek her as soon as the craft was made fast to wharf—­then she felt her worst forebodings taking bodily shape:  he was ill, he had fallen overboard, he had left the vessel at Liverpool and shipped upon another, and a letter would come directly to say so; or else he had been waylaid and robbed and made away with:  not once did she dream that he was false to her—­to her, a portion of his own life!