“I do not know. It was not my fault,” continued she, weeping yet more bitterly.

“How could I know you?” he said again. “You were so different when I left home! But you should have known me!”

She threw up her hands in despair.

“Ah! I see so many of them⁠—these men. They all look alike to me now!”

His heart contracted so painfully and so strongly that he wanted to cry aloud, as a little boy does when he is beaten.

He rose and held her at arm’s length; then, seizing her head in his great sailor paws, he gazed intently into her face.

Little by little he recognized in her the small, slender, merry maiden he had left at home with those others whose eyes it had been her lot to close.