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 the door and kissed his hair with a little sigh.

She was a proud woman, and she had hoped to see her son as distinguished a naval officer as his grandfather had been. The sudden destruction of her ambition was a greater grief than she confessed even to herself, and she had unconsciously allowed her shattered pride to change her attitude toward the child. In seeing closed before him the doors of the active career she had planned, she quite failed to perceive that it was she who should have come to him in his need, to open for him the wide, enchanted gates of resources which might still be his.

Now, as she bent above him in the dim cabin, the old disappointment rushed fiercely over her, and the kiss she gave him was from her lips, not from her heart.

Fen did not lose faith in his talisman,