Motion Picture Story Magazine (Feb-Jul 1911)

32 THE MOTION PICTURE STORY MAGAZINE. turned from your sins and are not a bad man. Instead, yon are a good man and yon are going to be still better." "But the strength to do better you have given me/" replied Jack, bluntly. "It does not require much strength to influence those who are led by the spirit of love/"' she said. "I have seen a beautiful picture of strong beasts being led by a little child with a face like that of an angel/' "That may be true." admitted the seeker after righteousness, "but I know I can't go on being good without you, and that's all there is about it. You're the first person who ever seen any good in me. You are the only one who ever told me I was a good man and might get to be better. You're the one life saver that pointed the way, and now I've got to the port where I can't get no further unless you ship on the same boat. I know I've had a rough passage, and I ain't no more fit to be in the same class with you than them beasts you say was to be with the little child, but I'm starting on a new voyage, now, and I tell you, girl, I'll need a pilot every inch of the way." Agnes could not doubt the sincerity of the speaker. She had heard good resolutions many times before. She knew they were always sincere at the time they were spoken. The great problem was how to help poor souls to live up to them and not to fall back into lives of degradation. While Jack was telling of his shipwrecked past, of his present resolves, and his future hopes, she had noticed the faint flash of spiritual light shining far below the surface of the man's life, and believed that, as the light grew stronger, it would increase in brilliancy until the whole soul was illumined. He had no home; he had never known a mother's love; he had never before been under good influences. What might he not have been had his life been cast in a different mold? Her heart filled with pity for the pleading creature before her. A great love for the noble man of her ideals which he might have been and which, with help and guidance, he might yet become, came over her. "Agnes, my Captain, are you going to be my pilot?" Jack asked the question earnestly, wistfully. Captain Agnes was considering. For several moments she hung her head in thought, and then she looked up into his eyes. "Yes, Jack," she said softly. Lieutenant Landers received the news next day with sadness not unmingled with fear for the happiness of the woman he loved. He, too, had heard good resolutions before, and he knew how prone new converts were to fall from grace. Perhaps he knew from experience just how long and difficult the struggle is for one unused to the straight and narrow road leading to perfection. "I wonder if the fellow will ever have the patience and the moral courage to keep straight," he said to himself again and again. Agnes had been but a child when her parents died, and all her girlhood had been spent amid the dreary routine of life in an orphanage. Later, she had gone to service as nursemaid and then into the Army. It was not surprising, therefore, that the little, two-room cottage in a nearby fishing village, to which Jack took his bride, seemed a veritable paradise to both. Jack had given up the sea when Agnes relinquished the Army life, and he in his rough way, and she with all sweetness of spirit, tried to make each other happy. During the day she sang about her tasks and when evening came she never failed to be down on the beach to welcome her burly husband. Jack was yet far from perfection and he often caused his fragile wife to sigh over his outbursts of temper. "I must be patient," she would say to herself. "He will overcome it all in time, for his heart is good and he loves me well. I will wait in faith and love, and I know I shall not be disappointed." The day that Aenes put on her new print-dress she had just finished making to go to meet Jack after his day's fishing, no thought of coming sorrow