So for three hours John was face to face with awful death, and Joan on her knees praying for his safety, and John had but just got back to his home, and the cry of thanksgiving for her old dear's return was yet on Joan's lips, when the postman brought the fateful newspaper. Fortunately they did not open it at once. Joan laid it carefully aside and brought on their belated breakfast. And as they ate it they talked of the lives that were lost and saved. Then John smoked his pipe, and Joan tidied up her house and sat down beside him with her knitting in her hands. Both their hearts were solemn and tender. John felt as if his life was a new gift to him; Joan, as if her husband's love had some miraculous sweetness never known before. They spoke seldom and softly, finding in their responsive silence a language beyond words.
It was, then, in this gentle mood that John reached to the shelf above his head and took down the paper. He opened it, and Denas in her pretty dancing dress, with her bare arms lifted above her head, looked her father full in the face. She was laughing; she was the incarnation of merriment and of consciously graceful, captivating vivacity. The miserable father was, however, fascinated; he gazed and gazed until his eyes overflowed, and his hands trembled, and the paper fell with a rustle to the floor.
Joan lifted it and looked at her husband. His eyes were shut, he was sobbing inwardly as punished children sob in sleep. She spoke to him, and he opened his eyes and pointed to the paper. Then Joan met the same well-beloved face. The mother's cheeks burned red and redder, her eyes flashed, she straightened out every crease, as if the pictured satin and lace had been real; and then turning to the printed page, she read aloud every word of adulation.
They had talked together of the men and women drowned within sight of land that morning, but here was their only child dancing in sight of eternal death, and they could not say a word to each other about her. For it must be remembered that these simple, God-fearing fisher-folk had been strictly and straitly reared in a creed which regarded dancing as one of the deadly sins. They honestly believed that there was but a step between their darling and eternal death, and if she should take that step while dancing! To have known that she was on the ship which had just gone to pieces on the rocks would not have made them so heart-sick. Their very souls shivered as they thought of her. As for John, he could find only those two words that spring instinctively to every soul in trouble, "O God!"