in the sunshine of california, in the cheerfulness of life in san francisco, keturah grew steadily better. dick hand executed a variety of projects, and only mermaid remained unstirred and uninfluenced by her surroundings, by the change of air and scene. it is perhaps wrong to speak of her as “unstirred.” she[217] was stirred and very deeply, but by no trifle of environment or of company. down in her the great tides were swinging, moving resistlessly and in vast volume, imperceptible in their drift and direction on the surface. as was inevitable, dick hand again asked her to marry him and this time she gave him a final refusal. she did not put him off. she knew it would be useless. the current had set and was sweeping on through her. she could chart it, and she knew it would not shift. something tremendous, something massive in her life would be required to deflect it.

“why,” she asked herself, “should i pretend to myself any longer? i love guy vanton. i think i have always loved him. he is in peril and he needs my help. when he was caught in the surf did i wait to see if he could save himself? not one instant! why do i wait now? why do i risk losing him, by letting him drown, forever? it isn’t right.”

she did up her hair in great coils, like thick cables of ship’s rope, and it seemed to her that each separate strand, so slender, so easily snapped, redoubled in its tensile power as it was gathered with the hundreds of others.

“life,” she thought to herself, “is like that. we are tied to the past by a thousand filaments, every one of them slight, fragile, easily snapped, quickly broken. but they are all twisted together. they are like this coil of hair. they are like a thousand threads spun[218] together, not to be snapped, not to be broken. a thousand things join guy to the past. some of the threads join the two of us.”

a fresh thought struck her.

“he can never escape wholly from his past. and i am almost the only thing or person in it that is pleasant or even halfway wholesome for him to remember.”

she recalled what she had told him, that he must no longer be passive but must act. did not this counsel apply to herself? she knew she wanted him. she knew he wanted her. but however great his want of her he could not and would not call upon her to make what might be the sacrifice of a life—her life—to save his own. how could he, a man nearing middle age, really nameless, a child of disgrace and the son and heir of evil, lonely, sensitive, not unliked, but virtually friendless—how could he ask her to become his wife? he could ask of her nothing that she did not freely and of her own impulse offer and give him—friendship, sympathy, help, advice. the last item had an ironical ring in mermaid’s consciousness. advice to the drowning!

if he had the strength to save himself he had that strength, and that was all there was to it. for what was she waiting? to see him exercise it? but she loved him. it was not proof of his strength she required. what he had, what he lacked, was nothing—simply nothing. if he hadn’t it, she had strength[219] enough for two. suppose she failed? suppose she knew she would fail? the old image persisted before her. if he were drowning and she knew that her effort to save him would not succeed, would she abandon him, just stand there watching, or await what would happen with averted eyes? of course not. you had to make the effort no matter if it was absolutely foredoomed to failure. and this effort which confronted her was not necessarily foredoomed at all; at least, so far as she or any one else could see. they might shake their heads but they could not tell.

in her way, the best way she could manage, she put this to her aunt, who listened almost silently until the end and then said, suddenly and abruptly: “of course, mary, if you love him—why, that settles everything.”

mermaid felt bound to insist on the logic leading to this conclusion.

“nonsense!” exclaimed mrs. hand, irritably. “you can’t reason about such a thing. when two persons love each other it settles everything—and unsettles everything, too,” she added. “there’s only one thing to do, and there’s only one person to do it.”

“there’s really no reason why a woman shouldn’t propose to a man,” continued keturah. “i’m no great respecter of conventions. you may remember the time when i used to wear a man’s old coat. conventions were made for the man and not man for the[220] conventions, except political conventions.” she was resorting, as was not unusual with her, to flippancy to cover emotion. “i don’t know but that i may be said to have proposed to your uncle hosea, when i got money that was rightfully his from his brother and put it in his hands, indirectly, as a lover sends a box of flowers to his sweetheart. only i couldn’t have the florist, lawyer brown, put my card in the box,” she noted. “however, it wasn’t necessary; it seldom is. you always know who sent the flowers.

“i believe, though i don’t know, that keturah hawkins proposed to john hawkins,” she went on. “john was a speechless sort of man all his life. i’m sure he never brought himself to utter any such words as: ‘will you marry me?’ they would have choked him. i suspect that at the proper time keturah began calmly to talk about plans for the house i live in, progressing by easy stages to such matters as the date of the wedding and the clothes he would need, down to his underwear, winter weight.

“they say the way to resume is to resume, but often the way to begin is to resume, too. each night that john called, keturah resumed the subject she had not discussed the night before; and so they were married and lived happily ever after.”

mermaid, reduced to laughter by this narration, said: “well, to resume what we were not talking about just now, i shall go east day after to-morrow if you[221] are willing. i will bring guy out here and then i can see you home. you ought not to travel alone.”

“don’t think you are going away and leave me in this place 3,000 miles from blue port, missy!” exclaimed her aunt. “i won’t stay here. besides, dick hand is cross as a catamount since you told him for the last time that——”

mrs. hand broke off the sentence as she might have bitten off a thread of unnecessary length. she looked at her niece and sighed.

“you are a fine woman, my dear,” she said. “come here and kiss me. you don’t have to put your mind on it. just a dutiful kiss will do.”

mermaid kissed her with undutiful violence.