Might he not be performing a kinder act to let her go down into the sea
than to entrust her to the charity of strangers? He must have wrestled
with all these problems and temptations as he stood lashed to the mast
out there in the fateful storm.
Ah, his confidence in a fatherhood more omniscient than his own had not
been misplaced. Loving hands had borne his darling safely through the
waves to a home where, in an atmosphere of devotion, the beauty that
had been in her from the beginning had perfected in its maturity. Even
the homely surroundings of the environment into which she drifted could
not stifle her native fineness of soul. Bred up a fisherman's daughter
she had lived and moved among plain, kindly people, whom she had
learned to cherish and revere as if they were of her blood, and to whom
she had endeared herself to a corresponding degree.
And now what was her future to be? Was she suddenly to be snatched
back into her rightful sphere, the ties that linked her with the
present snapped asunder, and a new world with the myriad opportunities
she had until now been denied placed within her reach? That was the
query that agitated the minds of the silent thinkers who sped along the
Harbor Road.
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