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Rh glossy in the late afternoon sunshine. It was very still and peaceful,—the sleepy village with long, stilted wharves behind him, the long beach and low water at his left hand, and in front, beyond the house, the yellow fields sloping up to the dark belt of fir woods toward which the sun was drawing down. The tide was far out; from the island and the point on the main shore the two long bars ran in thin and black penciling, almost joined at the channel. The horses that were pastured on the island were coming home,—tiny black figures that galloped along the bar, became mere specks as they swam the channel, and then galloped again to the land. Their whinnying, faint and thin across the mirror of the harbor, was the only sound. And as Marden stood there in the path, breathing the cool air that rose from the wet beach, drinking it in with the autumn sunshine, he was content in the happy weariness of a good day's work.

Suddenly he noticed that the door of the house was open, and that a thin smoke was curling from the chimney. And he had not