Stewart Edward White

Secret Harbour Stewart Edward White

For the first time since his marriage Marshall found himself again in Vancouver and again strolling idly down the backbone of the peninsula on which that fortunate city is situated. As was the case two years before, the day was crisp with early spring. Coal Harbour gleamed blue on one side, and on the other the wide waters of English Bay twinkled under a singing breeze. Lion Peak rose high and snow clad across the way, and the masts of tall ships. Even the same birds, apparently, made the same cheerful remarks to him from the shrubbery of the tiny park through which his steps led him. But, he reflected, the situation had most considerably altered since that former occasion. Then he had been sick to the death of a profound indifference; unable either to live or to die with any satisfaction to himself; at loose ends with the universe; with no future, with no past that he cared to remember, and the present gray. Now he was happily married to a woman whose possibilities, he felt, would suffice for the explorations of several lifetimes; each of his days rose with a song of invitation; and each seemed to reveal to him new energies of which he would never have believed himself capable. The beginning of the change, of the cure of his spirit, had taken place in this city; indeed, as he looked about him, he told himself it must have been on this very street. Yes; yonder was the square brick house where he had first met that queer, humorous, wise human entity who had called himself the Healer of Souls, and who had led him forth into the series of adventures that had culminated in a complete cure and an equally complete wife. After which the magician had disappeared for foreign parts, leaving his sister and her husband to the manifold devices possible to youth and wealth.