The gleam vanished; the train jogged on again between trees and fields. Houses cropped up, singly, then in groups, then in streets; the train slowed down by rural platforms, people got in and out. An hour later, as the usual clanking and jarring announced another halt, Vance said: "Here!" He reached for their joint suitcase, took Laura Lou by the arm, and pushed her excitedly toward the door. A minute later they were standing on a shabby platform, while the train swung off again and left them alone in a world of shanties and sandhills. "We'll have to walk," Vance explained, picking up the suitcase, which seemed to him to weigh no more than a feather. As soon as they had left the station every rut of the road, every tussock of grass and hunched-up scrub oak cowering down against the wind, started up familiarly before him. If he lived to be a thousand, he thought, he would never forget an inch of that road.

Laura Lou seemed to have cast aside her apprehensions. She swung along beside him, saying now and then: "Where are we going?" and laughing contentedly at his joyous: "You'll see." There was no sense of winter in the air; but as they advanced a breath of salt and seaweed made their faces tingle, and Vance, drawn by it, started into a run. "There's not a minute to lose!" he called back; and Laura Lou raced after him, stumbling on her high heels among the sandy ruts. They scrambled on, speechless with haste, drunk with sun and air and their own hearts; and presently he dragged her up the last hillock, and there lay the ocean. He had sworn to himself that one day he would come back and see it with the girl he loved; but he had not known that the girl would be Laura Lou. He felt a little awed to think that the hand of Destiny had been on his shoulder even then; and as he gazed at the heaving silver reaches he wondered if they had known all the while where he was going, and if now they saw the path that lay ahead.

When, three years earlier, he had come down in summer to that same beach, lonely, half starved, dazed with discouragement, fevered from overwork, the sea had been a gray tumult under a sunless sky; now, on this December day, it flashed with summer fires. "Like my life," he thought, putting out his arm to draw Laura Lou to the ridge on which he sat. "There," he said, his cheek on hers, "there's where our bird's mother was born."

Her bewildered eyes turned to him under their hummingbird lashes. "Our bird's mother?"