Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/301

Rh like to be buried in it; but I s'pose ye could n't fix it so very well."

Mrs. Bennet did not in the least share her husband's love of the water. It frightened her, and it bored her, and she hated the isolation with which it surrounded her. She paced the narrow sand-spit which linked the light-house rock to the main land like a prisoner. When Tilly was a baby she carried her in her arms; as soon as the little thing could toddle, she led her by the hand back and forth, back and forth, on the narrow belt, always gazing across at the town with a hungry yearning for its streets and people, and with a restless watching for some boat to put out toward the light-house. The child soon shared her mother's feeling, and the earliest emotion which Tilly could recollect was an intense consciousness of being imprisoned. In the summer there were visitors at the light-house almost every day. All travelers who visited Provincetown came over to see the beautiful Fresnel light, and the townspeople themselves frequently sailed across and anchored for fishing just beyond the spit. These visitors were Mrs. Bennet's one consolation; by means of them she seemed to keep some tangible hold on life and dry land; and, moreover, they were the only foundation of her one air-castle. Poor, lonely, circumscribed, discontented woman! she had but one, yet that one seemed at first as far removed from the possibility of her attaining it as could the