Page:Silver Shoal Light.djvu/293

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STAR-SET AND SUNRISE
271

had tried to tell her about the poor little newsboy. She wished, too, that he could know Garth.

"Though he couldn't love him more than I do," Joan reflected; "no one could."

Then, with quick humiliation, she remembered a time when Garth had tried to do something beyond his power and had fallen. Jim caught him as he fell, before Elspeth reached him, and in their faces had been a love so deep that Joan could hardly understand it, and had felt distant, awed, before it. Yet she had just said that no one could love him more than she!

She raised her head and looked out into the night. There was no sound but the rushing and dying of waves among the pebbles and the crack of falling embers. Overhead the stars marched and burned in voiceless splendor, and low on the horizon the Light held out its clear sea-candle, steadfast and calm and pale.

Joan turned away from the fire, and looked at Garth. The firelight reached him faintly, setting a glimmer on the hair about his forehead and flickering down the clean line of his cheek. The hilt of the broad-sword, gleaming dully green, lay almost within the grasp of his outflung hand. Behind him the ragged crest