WILD ORANGES

WILD ORANGES

BY

JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER

ILLUSTRATED WITH SCENES FROM

KING VIDOR'S PHOTOPLAY

A GOLDWYN PICTURE

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS--NEW YORK

Made in the United States of America

COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc. 

Published, April, 1918, in a volume now out of print, entitled "Gold and Iron, " and then reprinted twice. 

First published separately, March, 1922

TO GEORGE HORACE LORIMER

WILD ORANGES

I

The ketch drifted into the serene inclosure of the bay as silently asthe reflections moving over the mirrorlike surface of the water. Beyond a low arm of land that hid the sea the western sky was asingle, clear yellow; farther on the left the pale, incalculably oldlimbs of cypress, their roots bare, were hung with gathering shadowsas delicate as their own faint foliage. The stillness was emphasizedby the ceaseless murmur of the waves breaking on the far, seawardbars. 

John Woolfolk brought the ketch up where he intended to anchor andcalled to the stooping white-clad figure in the bow: "Let go!" Therewas an answering splash, a sudden rasp of hawser, the booms swungidle, and the yacht imperceptibly settled into her berth. The wheelturned impotently; and, absent-minded, John Woolfolk locked it. Hedropped his long form on a carpet-covered folding chair near by. Hewas tired. His sailor, Poul Halvard, moved about with a noiseless andswift efficiency; he rolled and cased the jib, and then, with ahandful of canvas stops, secured and covered the mainsail andproceeded aft to the jigger. Unlike Woolfolk, Halvard was short--asquare figure with a smooth, deep-tanned countenance, colorless andsteady, pale blue eyes. His mouth closed so tightly that it appearedimmovable, as if it had been carved from some obdurate material thatopened for the necessities of neither speech nor sustenance. 

Tall John Woolfolk was darkly tanned, too, and had a grey gaze, by turns sharply focused with bright black pupils and blanklyintrospective. He was garbed in white flannels, with bare ankles andsandals, and an old, collarless silk shirt, with sleeves rolledback on virile arms incongruously tattooed with gauzy greencicadas. 

He stayed motionless while Halvard put the yacht in order for thenight. The day's passage through twisting inland waterways, the hazardof the tides on shifting flats, the continual concentration on detailsat once trivial and highly necessary, had been more wearing than thecyclone the ketch had weathered off Barbuda the year before. They hadbeen landbound since dawn; and all day John Woolfolk's instinct hadrevolted against the fields and wooded points, turning toward the opensea. 

Halvard disappeared into the cabin; and, soon after, a faint, hot air, the smell of scorched metal, announced the lighting of the vaporstove, the preparations for supper. Not a breath stirred the surfaceof the bay. The water, as transparently clear as the hardly darkenedair, lay like a great amethyst clasped by its dim corals and the armof the land. The glossy foliage that, with the exception of a smallsilver beach, choked the shore might have been stamped from metal. Itwas, John Woolfolk suddenly thought, amazingly still. The atmosphere, too, was peculiarly heavy, languorous. It was laden with the scents ofexotic, flowering trees; he recognized the smooth, heavy odor ofoleanders and the clearer sweetness of orange blossoms. 

He was idly surprised at the latter; he had not known that orangegroves had been planted and survived in Georgia. Woolfolk gazed moreattentively at the shore, and made out, in back of the luxurianttangle, the broad white façade of a dwelling. A pair of marine glasseslay on the deck at his hand; and, adjusting them, he surveyed the faceof a distinguished ruin. The windows on the stained wall were brokenin--they resembled the empty eyes of the dead; storms had batteredloose the neglected roof, leaving a corner open to sun and rain; hecould see through the foliage lower down great columns fallen about asweeping portico. 

The house was deserted, he was certain of that--the melancholywreckage of a vanished and resplendent time. Its small principality, flourishing when commerce and communication had gone by water, was oneof the innumerable victims of progress and of the concentration ofeffort into huge impersonalities. He thought he could trace other evenmore complete ruins, but his interest waned. He laid the glasses backupon the deck. The choked bubble of boiling water sounded from thecabin, mingled with the irregular sputter of cooking fat and theclinking of plates and silver as Halvard set the table. Without, thelight was fading swiftly; the wavering cry of an owl quivered from thecypress across the water, and the western sky changed from paleryellow to green. Woolfolk moved abruptly, and, securing a bucket tothe handle of which a short rope had been spliced and finished with anornamental Turk's-head, he swung it overboard and brought it up halffull. In the darkness of the bucket the water shone with a faintphosphorescence. Then from a basin he lathered his hands with a thick, pinkish paste, washed his face, and started toward the cabin. 

He was already in the companionway when, glancing across the stillsurface of the bay, he saw a swirl moving into view about a smallpoint. He thought at first that it was a fish, but the next moment sawthe white, graceful silhouette of an arm. It was a woman swimming. John Woolfolk could now plainly make out the free, solid mass of herhair, the naked, smoothly turning shoulder. She was swimming withdeliberate ease, with a long, single overarm stroke; and it wasevident that she had not seen the ketch. Woolfolk stood, his gazelevel with the cabin top, watching her assured progress. She turnedagain, moving out from the shore, then suddenly stopped. Now, herealized, she saw him. 

The swimmer hung motionless for a breath; then, with a strong, sinuousdrive, she whirled about and made swiftly for the point of land. Shewas visible for a short space, low in the water, her hair wavering inthe clear flood, and then disappeared abruptly behind the point, leaving behind--a last vanishing trace of her silent passage--asmooth, subsiding wake on the surface of the bay. 

John Woolfolk mechanically descended the three short steps to thecabin. There had been something extraordinary in the woman's briefappearance out of the odorous tangle of the shore, with its ruinedhabitation. It had caught him unprepared, in a moment of half wearyrelaxation, and his imagination responded with a faint question towhich it had been long unaccustomed. But Halvard, in crisp white, standing behind the steaming supper viands, brought his thoughts againto the day's familiar routine. 

The cabin was divided through its forward half by the centerboardcasing, and against it a swinging table had been elevated, animmaculate cover laid, and the yacht's china, marked in cobalt withthe name Gar, placed in a polished and formal order. Halvard's servicefrom the stove to the table was as silent and skillful as his housingof the sails; he replaced the hot dishes with cold, and provided aglass bowl of translucent preserved figs. 

Supper at an end, Woolfolk rolled a cigarette from shag that resembledcoarse black tea and returned to the deck. Night had fallen on theshore, but the water still held a pale light; in the east the sky wasfilled with an increasing, cold radiance. It was the moon, risingswiftly above the flat land. The moonlight grew in intensity, castinginky shadows of the spars and cordage across the deck, making thelight in the cabin a reddish blur by contrast. The icy flood sweptover the land, bringing out with a new emphasis the close, glossyfoliage and broken façade--it appeared unreal, portentous. The odorsof the flowers, of the orange blossoms, uncoiled in heavy, palpablewaves across the water, accompanied by the owl's fluctuating cry. Thesense of imminence increased, of a _genius loci_ unguessed andtroublous, vaguely threatening in the perfumed dark. 

II

John Woolfolk had said nothing to Halvard of the woman he had seenswimming in the bay. He was conscious of no particular reason forremaining silent about her; but the thing had become invested with aglamour that, he felt, would be destroyed by commonplace discussion. He had no personal interest in the episode, he was careful to add. Interests of that sort, serving to connect him with the world, withsociety, with women, had totally disappeared from his life. He rolledand lighted a fresh cigarette, and in the minute orange spurt of thematch his mouth was somber and forbidding. 

The unexpected appearance on the glassy water had merely started intobeing a slight, fanciful curiosity. The women of that coast did notcommonly swim at dusk in their bays; such simplicity obtained now onlyin the reaches of the highest civilization. There were, he knew, nohunting camps here, and the local inhabitants were mere soddensquatters. A chart lay in its flat canvas case by the wheel; and, inthe crystal flood of the moon, he easily reaffirmed from it hisknowledge of the yacht's position. Nothing could be close by butscattered huts and such wreckage as that looming palely above theoleanders. 

Yet a woman had unquestionably appeared swimming from behind the pointof land off the bow of the _Gar_. The women native to the locality, and the men, too, were fanatical in the avoidance of any unnecessaryexterior application of water. His thoughts moved in a monotonouscircle, while the enveloping radiance constantly increased. It becameas light as a species of unnatural day, where every leaf was clearlyrevealed but robbed of all color and familiar meaning. 

He grew restless, and rose, making his way forward about thenarrow deck-space outside the cabin. Halvard was seated on a coilof rope beside the windlass and stood erect as Woolfolk approached. The sailor was smoking a short pipe, and the bowl made a crimson sparkin his thick, powerful hand. John Woolfolk fingered the woodsurface of the windlass bitts and found it rough and gummy. Halvard said instinctively:

"I'd better start scraping the mahogany tomorrow, it's gettingwhite. "

Woolfolk nodded. Halvard was a good man. He had the valuable qualityof commonly anticipating spoken desires. He was a Norwegian, out ofthe Lofoden Islands, where sailors are surpassingly schooled in theArctic seas. Poul Halvard, so far as Woolfolk could discover, wasimpervious to cold, to fatigue, to the insidious whispering of mereflesh. He was a man without temptation, with an untroubled allegianceto a duty that involved an endless, exacting labor; and for thosereasons he was austere, withdrawn from the community of more fragileand sympathetic natures. At times his inflexible integrity oppressedJohn Woolfolk. Halvard, he thought, was a difficult man to live upto. 

He turned and absently surveyed the land. His restlessness increased. He felt a strong desire for a larger freedom of space than thatoffered by the _Gar_, and it occurred to him that he might go ashorein the tender. He moved aft with this idea growing to a determination. In the cabin, on the shelf above the berths built against the sides ofthe ketch, he found an old blue flannel coat, with crossed squashrackets and a monogram embroidered in yellow on the breast pocket. Slipping it on, he dropped over the stern of the tender. 

Halvard came instantly aft, but Woolfolk declined the mutely offeredservice. The oars made a silken swish in the still bay as he pulledaway from the yacht. The latter's riding light, swung on the forestay, hung without a quiver, like a fixed yellow star. He looked once overhis shoulder, and then the bow of the tender ran with a soft shockupon the beach. Woolfolk bedded the anchor in the sand and then stoodgazing curiously before him. 

On his right a thicket of oleanders drenched the air with the perfumeof their heavy poisonous flowering, and behind them a rough clearingof saw grass swept up to the débris of the fallen portico. To theleft, beyond the black hole of a decaying well, rose the walls of asecond brick building, smaller than the dwelling. A few shreds ofrotten porch clung to its face; and the moonlight, pouring through abreak above, fell in a livid bar across the obscurity of a high singlechamber. 

Between the crumbling piles there was the faint trace of a footway, and Woolfolk advance to where, inside a dilapidated sheltering fence, he came upon a dark, compact mass of trees and smelled the increasingsweetness of orange blossoms. He struck the remains of a board path, and progressed with the cold, waxen leaves of the orange treesbrushing his face. There was, he saw in the grey brightness, ripefruit among the branches, and he mechanically picked an orange andthen another. They were small but heavy, and had fine skins. 

He tore one open and put a section in his mouth. It was at firstsurprisingly bitter, and he involuntarily flung away what remained inhis hand. But after a moment he found that the oranges possessed apungency and zestful flavor that he had tasted in no others. Then hesaw, directly before him, a pale, rectangular light which herecognized as the opened door of a habitation. 

III

He advanced more slowly, and a low, irregular house detached itselffrom the tangled growth pressing upon it from all sides. The doorway, dimly lighted by an invisible lamp from within, was now near by; andJohn Woolfolk saw a shape cross it, so swiftly furtive that it wasgone before he realized that a man had vanished into the hall. Therewas a second stir on the small covered portico, and the slender, white-clad figure of a woman moved uncertainly forward. He stoppedjust at the moment in which a low, clear voice demanded: "What do youwant?"

The question was directly put, and yet the tone held an inexplicablyacute apprehension. The woman's voice bore a delicate, bell-likeshiver of fear. 

"Nothing, " he hastened to assure her. "When I came ashore I thought noone was living here. "

"You're from the white boat that sailed in at sunset?"

"Yes, " he replied, "and I am returning immediately. "

"It was like magic!" she continued. "Suddenly, without a sound, youwere anchored in the bay. " Even this quiet statement bore the shadowyalarm. John Woolfolk realized that it had not been caused by hisabrupt appearance; the faint accent of dread was fixed in the illusiveform before him. 

"I have robbed you too, " he continued in a lighter tone. "Your orangesare in my pocket. "

"You won't like them, " she returned indirectly; "they've run wild. Wecan't sell them. "

"They have a distinct flavor of their own, " he assured her. "I shouldbe glad to have some on the _Gar_. "

"All you want. "

"My man will get them and pay you. "

"Please don't----" She stopped abruptly, as if a sudden considerationhad interrupted a liberal courtesy. When she spoke again theapprehension, Woolfolk thought, had increased to palpable fright. "Wewould charge you very little, " she said finally. "Nicholas attends tothat. "

Silence fell upon them. She stood with her hand resting lightlyagainst an upright support, coldly revealed by the moon. JohnWoolfolk saw that, although slight, her body was delicately full, and that her shoulders held a droop which somehow resembled theshadow on her voice. She bore an unmistakable refinement of being, strange in that locality of meager humanity. Her speech totally lackedthe unintelligible, loose slurring of the natives. 

"Won't you sit down, " she at last broke the silence. "My father washere when you came up, but he went in. Strangers disturb him. "

Woolfolk moved to the portico, elevated above the ground, where hefound a momentary place. The woman sank back into a low chair. Thestillness gathered about them once more, and he mechanically rolled acigarette. Her white dress, although simply and rudely made, gaineddistinction from her free, graceful lines; her feet, in black, heelless slippers, were narrow and sharply cut. He saw that hercountenance bore an even pallor on which her eyes made shadows likethose on marble. 

These details, unremarkable in themselves, were charged with apeculiar intensity. John Woolfolk, who long ago had put suchconsiderations from his existence, was yet clearly conscious of thedisturbing quality of her person. She possessed the indefinableproperty of charm. Such women, he knew, stirred life profoundly, reanimating it with extraordinary efforts and desires. Their merepassage, the pressure of their fingers, were more imperative than thelife service of others; the flutter of their breath could be moretyrannical that the most poignant memories and vows. 

John Woolfolk thought these things in a manner absolutely detached. They touched him at no point. Nevertheless, the faint curiositystirred within him remained. The house unexpectedly inhabited behindthe ruined façade on the water, the magnetic woman with the echo ofapprehension in her cultivated voice, the parent, so easily disturbed, even the mere name "Nicholas, " all held a marked potentiality ofemotion; they were set in an almost hysterical key. 

He was suddenly conscious of the odorous pressure of the floweringtrees, of the orange blossoms and the oleanders. It was stifling. Hefelt that he must escape at once, from all the cloying and insidiousscents of the earth, to the open and sterile sea. The thick tangle inthe colorless light of the moon, the dimmer portico with its enigmaticfigure, were a cunning essence of the existence from which he hadfled. Life's traps were set with just such treacheries--perfume andmystery and the veiled lure of sex. 

He rose with an uncouth abruptness, a meager commonplace, and hurriedover the path to the beach, toward the refuge, the release, of the_Gar_. 

John Woolfolk woke at dawn. A thin, bluish light filled the cabin;above, Halvard was washing the deck. The latter was vigorouslyswabbing the cockpit when Woolfolk appeared, but he paused. 

"Perhaps, " the sailor said, "you will stay here for a day or two. I'dlike to unship the propeller, and there's the scraping. It's a goodanchorage. "

"We're moving on south, " Woolfolk replied, stating the determinationwith which he had retired. Then the full sense of Halvard's wordspenetrated his waking mind. The propeller, he knew, had not openedproperly for a week; and the anchorage was undoubtedly good. This wasthe last place, before entering the Florida passes, for whatever minoradjustments were necessary. 

The matted shore, flushed with the rising sun, was starred with whiteand deep pink blooms; a ray gilded the blank wall of the desertedmansion. The scent of the orange blossoms was not so insistent as ithad been on the previous evening. The land appeared normal; itexhibited none of the disturbing influence of which he had been firstconscious. Last night's mood seemed absurd. 

"You are quite right, " he altered his pronouncement; "we'll put the_Gar_ in order here. People are living behind the grove, and there'llbe water. "

He had, for breakfast, oranges brought down the coast, and he wassurprised at their sudden insipidity. They were little better thanfaintly sweetened water. He turned and in the pocket of his flannelcoat found one of those he had picked the night before. It was as keenas a knife; the peculiar aroma had, without doubt, robbed him of alldesire for the cultivated oranges of commerce. 

Halvard was in the tender, under the stern of the ketch, when itoccurred to John Woolfolk that it would be wise to go ashore andestablish his assertion of an adequate water supply. He explained thisbriefly to the sailor, who put him on the small shingle of sand. Therehe turned to the right, moving idly in a direction away from that hehad taken before. 

He crossed the corner of the demolished abode, made his way through apress of sere cabbage palmettos, and emerged suddenly on the blindingexpanse of the sea. The limpid water lay in a bright rim overcorrugated and pitted rock, where shallow ultramarine pools spreadgardens of sulphur-yellow and rose anemones. The land curved in uponthe left; a ruined landing extended over the placid tide, and, seatedthere with her back toward him, a woman was fishing. 

It was, he saw immediately, the woman of the portico. At the moment ofrecognition she turned, and after a brief inspection, slowly waved herhand. He approached, crossing the openings in the precarious boardingof the landing, until he stood over her. She said:

"There's an old sheepshead under here I've been after for a year. Ifyou'll be very still you can see him. "

She turned her face up to him, and he saw that her cheeks were withouttrace of color. At the same time he reaffirmed all that he felt beforewith regard to the potent quality of her being. She had a lustrousmass of warm brown hair twisted into a loose knot that had slidforward over a broad, low brow; a pointed chin; and pale, disturbinglips. But her eyes were her most notable feature--they were widelyopened and extraordinary in color; the only similitude that occurredto John Woolfolk was the grey greenness of olive leaves. In them hefelt the same foreboding that had shadowed her voice. The fleetpassage of her gaze left an indelible impression of an expectancy thatwas at once a dread and a strangely youthful candor. She was, hethought, about thirty. 

She wore now a russet skirt of thin, coarse texture that, like thedress of the evening, took a slim grace from her fine body, and awhite waist, frayed from many washings, open upon her smooth, roundthroat. 

"He's usually by this post, " she continued, pointing down through theclear gloom of the water. 

Woolfolk lowered himself to a position at her side, his gaze followingher direction. There, after a moment, he distinguished the sheepshead, barred in black and white, wavering about the piling. His companionwas fishing with a short, heavy rod from which time had dissolved thevarnish, an ineffectual brass reel that complained shrilly wheneverthe lead was raised or lowered, and a thick, freely-knotted line. 

"You should have a leader, " he told her. "The old gentleman can seeyour line too plainly. "

There was a sharp pull, she rapidly turned the handle of theprotesting reel, and drew up a gasping, bony fish with extended redwings. 

"Another robin!" she cried tragically. "This is getting serious. Dinner, " she informed him, "and not sport, is my object. "

He looked out to where a channel made a deep blue stain through thepaler cerulean of the sea. The tide, he saw from the piling, was low. 

"There should be a rockfish in the pass, " he pronounced. 

"What good if there is?" she returned. "I couldn't possibly throw outthere. And if I could, why disturb a rock with this?" She shook theshort awkward rod, the knotted line. 

He privately acknowledged the palpable truth of her objections, androse. 

"I've some fishing things on the ketch, " he said, moving away. He blewshrilly on a whistle from the beach, and Halvard dropped over the_Gar's_ side into the tender. 

Woolfolk was soon back on the wharf, stripping the canvas cover fromthe long cane tip of a fishing rod brilliantly wound with green andvermilion, and fitting it into a dark, silver-capped butt. He locked acapacious reel into place, and, drawing a thin line through agateguides, attached a glistening steel leader and chained hook. Then, adding a freely swinging lead, he picked up the small mullet that layby his companion. 

"Does that have to go?" she demanded. "It's such a slim chance, and itis my only mullet. "

He ruthlessly sliced a piece from the silvery side; and, rising andswitching his reel's gear, he cast. The lead swung far out across thewater and fell on the farther side of the channel. 

"But that's dazzling!" she exclaimed; "as though you had shot it outof a gun. "

He tightened the line, and sat with the rod resting in a leathersocket fastened to his belt. 

"Now, " she stated, "we will watch at the vain sacrifice of an onlymullet. "

The day was superb, the sky sparkled like a great blue sun; schools ofyoung mangrove snappers swept through the pellucid water. The womansaid:

"Where did you come from and where are you going?"

"Cape Cod, " he replied; "and I am going to the Guianas. "

"Isn't that South America?" she queried. "I've traveled far--on maps. Guiana, " she repeated the name softly. For a moment the faint dread inher voice changed to longing. "I think I know all the beautiful namesof places on the earth, " she continued: "Tarragona and Seriphos andCambodia. "

"Some of them you have seen?"

"None, " she answered simply. "I was born here, in the house you know, and I have never been fifty miles away. "

This, he told himself, was incredible. The mystery that surrounded herdeepened, stirring more strongly his impersonal curiosity. 

"You are surprised, " she added; "it's mad, but true. There--there is areason. " She stopped abruptly, and, neglecting her fishing rod, satwith her hands clasped about slim knees. She gazed at him slowly, andhe was impressed once more by the remarkable quality of her eyes, grey-green like olive leaves and strangely young. The momentaryinterest created in her by romantic and far names faded, gave place tothe familiar trace of fear. In the long past he would have respondedimmediately to the appeal of her pale, magnetic countenance.... He hadbroken all connection with society, with----

There was a sudden, impressive jerk at his line, the rod instantlyassumed the shape of a bent bow, and, as he rose, the reel spindle waslost in a grey blur and the line streaked out through the dipping tip. His companion hung breathless at his shoulder. 

"He'll take all your line, " she lamented as the fish continued hisstraight, outward course, while Woolfolk kept an even pressure on therod. 

"A hundred yards, " he announced as he felt a threaded mark wheelfrom under his thumb. Then: "A hundred and fifty. I'm afraid it's ashark. " As he spoke the fish leaped clear of the water, a spot ofmolten silver, and fell back in a sparkling blue spray. "It's arock, " he added. He stopped the run momentarily; the rod bentperilously double, but the fish halted. Woolfolk reeled in smoothly, but another rush followed, as strong as the first. A long, equalstruggle ensued, the thin line was drawn as rigid as metal, the rodquivered and arched. Once the rockfish was close enough to beclearly distinguishable--strongly built, heavy-shouldered, withblack stripes drawn from gills to tail. But he was off again witha short, blundering rush. 

"If you will hold the rod, " Woolfolk directed his companion, "I'llgaff him. " She took the rod while he bent over the wharf's side. Thefish, on the surface of the water, half turned; and, striking the gaffthrough a gill, Woolfolk swung him up on the boarding. 

"There, " he pronounced, "are several dinners. I'll carry him to yourkitchen. "

"Nicholas would do it, but he's away, " she told him; "and my father isnot strong enough. That's a leviathan. "

John Woolfolk placed a handle through the rockfish's gills, and, carrying it with an obvious effort, he followed her over a narrow, trampled path through the rasped palmettos. They approached thedwelling from behind the orange grove; and, coming suddenly to theporch, surprised an incredibly thin, grey man in the act of lighting asmall stone pipe with a reed stem. He was sitting, but, seeingWoolfolk, he started sharply to his feet, and the pipe fell, shattering the bowl. 

"My father, " the woman pronounced: "Lichfield Stope. "

"Millie, " he stuttered painfully, "you know--I--strangers--"

John Woolfolk thought, as he presented himself, that he had neverbefore seen such an immaterial living figure. Lichfield Stope was likethe shadow of a man draped with unsubstantial, dusty linen. Into hiswaxen face beat a pale infusion of blood, as if a diluted wine hadbeen poured into a semi-opaque goblet; his sunken lips puffed out andcollapsed; his fingers, dust-colored like his garb, opened and shutwith a rapid, mechanical rigidity. 

"Father, " Millie Stope remonstrated, "you must manage yourself better. You know I wouldn't bring any one to the house who would hurt us. Andsee--we are fetching you a splendid rockfish. "

The older man made a convulsive effort to regain his composure. 

"Ah, yes, " he muttered; "just so. "

The flush receded from his indeterminate countenance. Woolfolk sawthat he had a goatee laid like a wasted yellow finger on his chin, andthat his hands hung on wrists like twisted copper wires from circularcuffs fastened with large mosaic buttons. 

"We are alone here, " he proceeded in a fluctuating voice, the voice ofa shadow; "the man is away. My daughter--I----" He grew inaudible, although his lips maintained a faint movement. 

The fear that lurked illusively in the daughter was in the parentmagnified to an appalling panic, an instinctive, acute agony that hadcrushed everything but a thin, tormented spark of life. He passed hishand over a brow as dry as the spongy limbs of the cypress, brushing ascant lock like dead, bleached moss. 

"The fish, " he pronounced; "yes ... Acceptable. "

"If you will carry it back for me, " Millie Stope requested; "we haveno ice; I must put it in water. " He followed her about a bay windowwith ornamental fretting that bore the shreds of old, variegatedpaint. He could see, amid an incongruous wreckage within, a dismantledbilliard table, its torn cloth faintly green beneath a film of dust. They turned and arrived at the kitchen door. "There, please. " Sheindicated a bench on the outside wall, and he deposited his burden. 

"You have been very nice, " she told him, making her phrase lesscommonplace by a glance of her wide, appealing eyes. "Now, I suppose, you will go on across the world?"

"Not tonight, " he replied distantly. 

"Perhaps, then, you will come ashore again. We see so few people. Myfather would be benefited. It was only at first, so suddenly--he wasstartled. "

"There is a great deal to do on the ketch, " he replied indirectly, maintaining his retreat from the slightest advance of life. "I cameashore to discover if you had a large water supply and if I might fillmy casks. "

"Rain water, " she informed him; "the cistern is full. "

"Then I'll send Halvard to you. " He withdrew a step, but paused at theincivility of his leaving. 

A sudden weariness had settled over the shoulders of Millie Stope; sheappeared young and very white. Woolfolk was acutely conscious of herutter isolation with the shivering figure on the porch, theunmaterialized Nicholas. She had delicate hands. 

"Good-by, " he said, bowing formally. "And thank you for the fishing. "

He whistled sharply for the tender. 

IV

Throughout the afternoon, with a triangular scraping iron, he assistedHalvard in removing the whitened varnish from the yacht's mahogany. They worked silently, with only the shrill note of the edges drawingacross the wood, while the westering sun plunged its diagonal rays farinto the transparent depths of the bay. The _Gar_ floated motionlesson water like a pale evening over purple and silver flowers threadedby fish painted the vermilion and green of parrakeets. Inshore thepallid cypresses seemed, as John Woolfolk watched them, to twist infebrile pain. With the waning of day the land took on its air ofunhealthy mystery; the mingled, heavy scents floated out in a sicklytide; the ruined façade glimmered in the half light. 

Woolfolk's thoughts turned back to the woman living in the miasma ofperfume and secret fear. He heard again her wistful voice pronouncethe names of far places, of Tarragona and Seriphos, investing themwith the accent of an intense hopeless desire. He thought of theinexplicable place of her birth and of the riven, unsubstantial figureof the man with the blood pulsing into his ocherous face. Some old, profound error or calamity had laid its blight upon him, he wascertain; but the most lamentable inheritance was not sufficient toaccount for the acute apprehension in his daughter's tones. This wasdifferent in kind from the spiritual collapse of the aging man. It wasactual, he realized that; proceeding--in part at least--from without. 

He wondered, scraping with difficulty the under-turning of a cathead, if whatever dark tide was centered above her would, perhaps, descendthrough the oleander-scented night and stifle her in the stagnantdwelling. He had a swift, vividly complete vision of the old man facedown upon the floor in a flickering, reddish light. 

He smiled in self-contempt at this neurotic fancy; and, straighteninghis cramped muscles, rolled a cigarette. It might be that the years hehad spent virtually alone on the silence of various waters hadaffected his brain. Halvard's broad, concentrated countenance, thesteady, grave gaze and determined mouth, cleared Woolfolk's mind ofits phantoms. He moved to the cockpit and from there said:

"That will do for today. "

Halvard followed, and commenced once more the familiar, orderedpreparations for supper. John Woolfolk, smoking while the sky turnedto malachite, became sharply aware of the unthinkable monotony of theuniversal course, of the centuries wheeling in dull succession intoinfinity. Life seemed to him no more varied than the wire drum inwhich squirrels raced nowhere. His own lot, he told himself grimly, was no worse than another. Existence was all of the same drab piece. It had seemed gay enough when he was young, worked with gold andcrimson threads, and then----

His thoughts were broken by Halyard's appearance in the companionway, and he descended to his solitary supper in the contracted, stillcabin. 

Again on deck his sense of the monotony of life trebled. He had beencruising now about the edges of continents for twelve years. Fortwelve years he had taken no part in the existence of the cities hehad passed, as often as possible without stopping, and of the villagesgathered invitingly under their canopies of trees. He was--yes, hemust be--forty-six. Life was passing away; well, let it ... Worthless. 

The growing radiance of the moon glimmered across the water and foldedthe land in a gossamer veil. The same uneasiness, the inchoate desireto go ashore that had seized upon him the night before, reasserted itsinfluence. The face of Millie Stope floated about him like a magicalgardenia in the night of the matted trees. He resisted the pressurelonger than before; but in the end he was seated in the tender, pulling toward the beach. 

He entered the orange grove and slowly approached the house beyond. Millie Stope advanced with a quick welcome. 

"I'm glad, " she said simply. "Nicholas is back. The fish weighed--"

"I think I'd better not know, " he interrupted. "I might be tempted tomention it in the future, when it would take on the historic suspicionof the fish story. "

"But it was imposing, " she protested. "Let's go to the sea; it's solimitless in the moonlight. "

He followed her over the path to where the remains of the wharfprojected into a sea as black, and as solid apparently, as ebony, andacross which the moon flung a narrow way like a chalk mark. MillieStope seated herself on the boarding and he found a place near by. Sheleaned forward, with her arms propped up and her chin couched on herpalms. Her potency increased rather than diminished with association;her skin had a rare texture; her movements, the turn of the wrists, were distinguished. He wondered again at the strangeness of hersituation. 

She looked about suddenly and surprised his palpable questioning. 

"You are puzzled, " she pronounced. "Perhaps you are setting me in themiddle of romance. Please don't! Nothing you might guess----" Shebroke off abruptly, returned to her former pose. "And yet, " she addedpresently, "I have a perverse desire to talk about myself. It'sperverse because, although you are a little curious, you have no realinterest in what I might say. There is something about you like--yes, like the cast-iron dog that used to stand in our lawn. It rusted away, cold to the last and indifferent, although I talked to it by the hour. But I did get a little comfort from its stolid painted eye. Perhapsyou'd act in the same way. 

"And then, " she went on when Woolfolk had somberly failed to comment, "you are going away, you will forget, it can't possibly matter. I musttalk, now that I have urged myself this far. After all, you needn'thave come back. But where shall I begin? You should know something ofthe very first. That happened in Virginia.... My father didn't go towar, " she said, sudden and clear. She turned her face toward him, andhe saw that it had lost its flower-like quality; it looked as if ithad been carved in stone. 

"He lived in a small, intensely loyal town, " she continued; "and whenVirginia seceded it burned with a single high flame of sacrifice. Myfather had been always a diffident man; he collected mezzotints andavoided people. So, when the enlistment began, he shrank away from thecrowds and hot speeches, and the men went off without him. He lived incomplete retirement then, with his prints, in a town of women. Itwasn't impossible at first; he discussed the situation with the fewold tradesmen that remained, and exchanged bows with the wives anddaughters of his friends. But when the dead commenced to be brought infrom the front it got worse. Belle Semple--he had always thought herunusually nice and pretty--mocked at him on the street. Then onemorning he found an apron tied to the knob of the front door. 

"After that he went out only at night. His servants had deserted him, and he lived by himself in a biggish, solemn house. Sometimes the newsof losses and deaths would be shouted through his windows; once stoneswere thrown in, but mostly he was let alone. It must have beenfrightful in his empty rooms when the South went from bad to worse. "She paused, and John Woolfolk could see, even in the obscurity, theslow shudder that passed over her. 

"When the war was over and what men were left returned--one with handsgone at the wrists, another without legs in a shabby wheelchair--thelife of the town started once more, but my father was for ever outsideof it. Little subscriptions for burials were made up, small schemesfor getting the necessities, but he was never asked. Men spoke to himagain, even some of the women. That was all. 

"I think it was then that a curious, perpetual dread fastened on hismind--a fear of the wind in the night, of breaking twigs or suddenvoices. He ordered things to be left on the steps, and he would peerout from under the blind to make sure that the walk was empty beforehe opened the door. 

"You must realize, " she said in a sharper voice, "that my father wasnot a pure coward at first. He was an extremely sensitive man whohated the rude stir of living and who simply asked to be leftundisturbed with his portfolios. But life's not like that. The warhunted him out and ruined him; it destroyed his being, just as itdestroyed the fortunes of others. 

"Then he began to think--it was absolute fancy--that there was aconspiracy in the town to kill him. He sent some of his things away, got together what money he had, and one night left his home secretlyon foot. He tramped south for weeks, living for a while in small placeafter place, until he reached Georgia, and then a town about fiftymiles from here----"

She broke off, sitting rigidly erect, looking out over the level blacksea with its shifting, chalky line of light, and a long silencefollowed. The antiphonal crying of the owls sounded over the bubblingswamp, the mephitic perfume hung like a vapor on the shore. JohnWoolfolk shifted his position. 

"My mother told me this, " his companion said suddenly. "Fatherrepeated it over and over through the nights after they were married. He slept only in snatches, and would wake with a gasp and his heartalmost bursting. I know almost nothing about her, except that she hada brave heart--or she would have gone mad. She was English and hadbeen a governess. They met in the little hotel where they weremarried. Then father bought this place, and they came here to live. "

Woolfolk had a vision of the tenuous figure of Lichfield Stope; he wassurprised that such acute agony had left the slightest trace ofhumanity; yet the other, after forty years of torment, still survivedto shudder at a chance footfall, the advent of a casual and harmlessstranger. 

This, then, was by implication the history of the woman at his side;it disposed of the mystery that had veiled her situation here. It wassurprisingly clear, even to the subtle influence that, inherited fromher father, had set the shadow of his own obsession upon her voice andeyes. Yet, in the moment that she had been made explicable, herecalled the conviction that the knowledge of an actual menace lurkedin her mind; he had seen it in the tension of her body, in the anxietyof fleet backward glances. 

The latter, he told himself, might be merely a symptom of mentalsickness, a condition natural to the influences under which she hadbeen formed. He tested and rejected that possibility--there could beno doubt of her absolute sanity. It was patent in a hundred details ofher carriage, in her mentality as it had been revealed in herrestrained, balanced narrative. 

There was, too, the element of her mother to be considered. MillieStope had known very little about her, principally the self-evidentfact of the latter's "brave heart. " It would have needed that toremain steadfast through the racking recitals of the long, wakingdarks; to accompany to this desolate and lonely refuge the man who hadhad an apron tied to his doorknob. In the degree that the daughter hadbeen a prey to the man's fear she would have benefited from thestiffer qualities of the English governess. Life once more assumed itsenigmatic mask. 

His companion said:

"All that--and I haven't said a word about myself, the real end of mysoliloquy. I'm permanently discouraged; I have qualms about boringyou. No, I shall never find another listener as satisfactory as theiron dog. "

A light glimmered far at sea. "I sit here a great deal, " she informedhim, "and watch the ships, a thumbprint of blue smoke at day and aspark at night, going up and down their water roads. You areenviable--getting up your anchor, sailing where you like, safe andfree. " Her voice took on a passionate intensity that surprised him; itwas sick with weariness and longing, with sudden revolt from thepervasive apprehension. 

"Safe and free, " he repeated thinly, as if satirizing the conditionimplied by those commonplace, assuaging words. He had, in his flightfrom society, sought simply peace. John Woolfolk now questioned allhis implied success. He had found the elemental hush of the sea, theiron aloofness of rocky and uninhabited coasts, but he had never beenable to still the dull rebellion within, the legacy of the past. Afeeling of complete failure settled over him. His safety and freedomamounted to this--that life had broken him and cast him aside. 

A long, hollow wail rose from the land, and Millie Stope movedsharply. 

"There's Nicholas, " she exclaimed, "blowing on the conch! They don'tknow where I am; I'd better go in. "

A small, evident panic took possession of her; the shiver in her voiceswelled. 

"No, don't come, " she added. "I'll be quicker without you. " She madeher way over the wharf to the shore, but there paused, "I supposeyou'll be going soon?"

"Tomorrow probably, " he answered. 

On the ketch Halvard had gone below for the night. The yacht swayedslightly to an unseen swell; the riding light moved backward andforward, its ray flickering over the glassy water. John Woolfolkbrought his bedding from the cabin and, disposing it on deck, lay withhis wakeful dark face set against the far, multitudinous worlds. 

V

In the morning Halvard proposed a repainting of the engine. 

"The Florida air, " he said, "eats metal overnight. " And the ketchremained anchored. 

Later in the day Woolfolk sounded the water casks cradled in thecockpit, and, when they answered hollow, directed his man with regardto their refilling. They drained a cask. Halvard put it on the tenderand pulled in to the beach. There he shouldered the empty containerand disappeared among the trees. 

Woolfolk was forward, preparing a chain hawser for coral anchorages, when he saw Halvard tramping shortly back over the sand. He enteredthe tender and, with a vicious shove, rowed with a powerful, vindictive sweep toward the ketch. The cask evidently had been leftbehind. He made the tender fast and swung aboard with his notableagility. 

"There's a damn idiot in that house, " he declared, in a surprisingdeparture from his customary detached manner. 

"Explain yourself, " Woolfolk demanded shortly. 

"But I'm going back after him, " the sailor stubbornly proceeded. "I'llturn any knife out of his hand. " It was evident that he was laboringunder an intense growing excitement and anger. 

"The only idiot's not on land, " Woolfolk told him. "Where's the watercask you took ashore?"

"Broken. "

"How?"

"I'll tell you fast enough. There was nobody about when I went up tothe house, although there was a chair rocking on the porch as if aperson had just left. I knocked at the door; it was open, and I wascertain that I heard someone inside, but nobody answered. Then after abit I went around back. The kitchen was open, too, and no one insight. I saw the water cistern and thought I'd fill up, when you couldsay something afterward. I did, and was rolling the cask about thehouse when this--loggerhead came out of the bushes. He wanted to knowwhat I was getting away with, and I explained, but it didn't suit him. He said I might be telling facts and again I mightn't. I saw there wasno use talking, and started rolling the cask again; but he put hisfoot on it, and I pushed one way and he the other----"

"And between you, you stove in the cask, " Woolfolk interrupted. 

"That's it, " Poul Halvard answered concisely. "Then I got mad, andoffered to beat in his face, but he had a knife. I could have brokenit out of his grip--I've done it before in a place or two--but Ithought I'd better come aboard and report before anything generalbegan. "

John Woolfolk was momentarily at a loss to establish the identity ofHalvard's assailant. 

He soon realized, however, that it must be Nicholas, whom he had neverseen, and who had blown such an imperative summons on the conch thenight before. Halvard's temper was communicated to him; he movedabruptly to where the tender was fastened. 

"Put me ashore, " he directed. He would make it clear that his man wasnot to be interrupted in the execution of his orders, and that hisproperty could not be arbitrarily destroyed. 

When the tender ran upon the beach and had been secured, Halvardstarted to follow him, but Woolfolk waved him back. There was a stiron the portico as he approached, the flitting of an unsubstantialform; but, hastening, John Woolfolk arrested Lichfield Stope in thedoorway. 

"Morning, " he nodded abruptly. "I came to speak to you about a watercask of mine. "

The other swayed like a thin, grey column of smoke. 

"Ah, yes, " he pronounced with difficulty. "Water cask----"

"It was broken here a little while back. "

At the suggestion of violence such a pitiable panic fell upon theolder man that Woolfolk halted. Lichfield Stope raised his hands as ifto ward off the mere impact of the words themselves; his face wasstained with the thin red tide of congestion. 

"You have a man named Nicholas, " Woolfolk proceeded. "I should like tosee him. "

The other made a gesture as tremulous and indeterminate as his speechand appeared to dissolve into the hall. John Woolfolk stood for amoment undecided and then moved about the house toward the kitchen. There, he thought, he might obtain an explanation of the breaking ofthe cask. A man was walking about within and came to the door asWoolfolk approached. 

The latter told himself that he had never seen a blanker countenance. In profile it showed a narrow brow, a huge, drooping nose, a pinchedmouth and insignificant chin. From the front the face of the man inthe doorway held the round, unscored cheeks of a fat and sleepy boy. The eyes were mere long glimmers of vision in thick folds of flesh;the mouth, upturned at the corners, lent a fixed, mechanical smile tothe whole. It was a countenance on which the passage of time andthoughts had left no mark; its stolidity had been moved by no feeling. His body was heavy and sagging. It possessed, Woolfolk recognized, aconsiderable unwieldy strength, and was completely covered by avariously spotted and streaked apron. 

"Are you Nicholas?" John Woolfolk demanded. 

The other nodded. 

"Then, I take it, you are the man who broke my water cask. "

"It was full of our water, " Nicholas replied in a thick voice. 

"That, " said Woolfolk, "I am not going to argue with you. I cameashore to instruct you to let my man and my property alone. "

"Then leave our water be. "

John Woolfolk's temper, the instinctive arrogance of men living apartfrom the necessary submissions of communal life, in positions--howeversmall--of supreme command, flared through his body. 

"I told you, " he repeated shortly, "that I would not discuss thequestion of the water. I have no intention of justifying myself toyou. Remember--your hands off. "

The other said surprisingly: "Don't get me started!" A spasm ofemotion made a faint, passing shade on his sodden countenance; hisvoice held almost a note of appeal. 

"Whether you 'start' or not is without the slightest significance, "Woolfolk coldly responded. 

"Mind, " the man went on, "I spoke first. "

A steady twitching commenced in a muscle at the flange of his nose. Woolfolk was aware of an increasing tension in the other, that gaineda peculiar oppressiveness from the lack of any corresponding outwardexpression. His heavy, blunt hand fumbled under the maculate apron;his chest heaved with a sudden, tempestuous breathing. "Don't startme, " he repeated in a voice so blurred that the words were hardlyrecognizable. He swallowed convulsively, his emotion mounting to aninchoate passion, when suddenly a change was evident. He made a short, violent effort to regain his self-control, his gaze fastened on apoint behind Woolfolk. 

The latter turned and saw Millie Stope approaching, her countenancehaggard with fear. "What has happened?" she cried breathlessly whileyet a little distance away. "Tell me at once----"

"Nothing, " Woolfolk promptly replied, appalled by the agony in hervoice. "Nicholas and I had a small misunderstanding. A triviality, " headded, thinking of the other's hand groping beneath the apron. 

VI

On the morning following the breaking of his water cask John Woolfolksaw the slender figure of Millie on the beach. She waved and called, her voice coming thin and clear across the water:

"Are visitors--encouraged?"

He sent Halvard in with the tender, and as they approached, dropped agangway over the _Gar's_ side. She stepped lightly down into thecockpit with a naïve expression of surprise at the yacht's immaculateorder. The sails lay precisely housed, the stays, freshly tarred, glistened in the sun, the brasswork and newly varnished mahoganyshone, the mathematically coiled ropes rested on a deck as spotless aswood could be scraped. 

"Why, " she exclaimed, "it couldn't be neater if you were two nice oldladies!"

"I warn you, " Woolfolk replied, "Halvard will not regard thatparticularly as a compliment. He will assure you that the order ofa proper yacht is beyond the most ambitious dream of a merehousekeeper. "

She laughed as Halvard placed a chair for her. She was, Woolfolkthought, lighter in spirit on the ketch than she had been on shore;there was the faintest imaginable stain on her petal-like cheeks; hereyes, like olive leaves, were almost gay. She sat with her slenderknees crossed, her fine arms held with hands clasped behind her head, and clad in a crisply ironed, crude white dress, into the band ofwhich she had thrust a spray of orange blossoms. 

John Woolfolk was increasingly conscious of her peculiar charm. MillieStope, he suddenly realized, was like the wild oranges in theneglected grove at her door. A man brought in contact with hermagnetic being charged with appealing and mysterious emotions, in asetting of exotic night and black sea, would find other women, theordinary concourse of society, insipid--like faintly sweetened water. 

She was entirely at home on the ketch, sitting against the immaculaterim of deck and the sea. He resented that familiarity as anunwarranted intrusion of the world he had left. Other people, womenamong them, had unavoidably crossed his deck, but they had beenpatently alien, momentary; but Millie, with her still delight at theyacht's compact comfort, her intuitive comprehension of its variousdetails--the lamps set in gimbals, the china racks and chart casesslung overhead--entered at once into the spirit of the craft that wasJohn Woolfolk's sole place of being. 

He was now disturbed by the ease with which she had establishedherself both in the yacht and in his imagination. He had thought, after so many years, to have destroyed all the bonds which ordinarilyconnect men with life; but now a mere curiosity had grown into atangible interest, and the interest showed unmistakable signs ofbecoming sympathy. 

She smiled at him from her position by the wheel; and he instinctivelyresponded with such an unaccustomed, ready warmth that he saidabruptly, seeking refuge in occupation:

"Why not reach out to sea? The conditions are perfect. "

"Ah, please!" she cried. "Just to take up the anchor would thrill mefor months. "

A light west wind was blowing; and deliberate, exactly spaced swells, their tops laced with iridescent spray, were sweeping in from a sealike a glassy blue pavement. Woolfolk issued a short order, and thesailor moved forward with his customary smooth swiftness. The sailswere shaken loose, the mainsail slowly spread its dazzling expanse tothe sun, the jib and jigger were trimmed, and the anchor came up witha short rush. 

Millie rose with her arms outspread, her chin high and eyes closed. 

"Free!" she proclaimed with a slow, deep breath. 

The sails filled and the ketch forged ahead. John Woolfolk, at thewheel, glanced at the chart section beside him. 

"There's four feet on the bar at low water, " he told Halvard. "Thetide's at half flood now. "

The _Gar_ increased her speed, slipping easily out of the bay, gladly, it seemed to Woolfolk, turning toward the sea. The bow rose, and theketch dipped forward over a spent wave. Millie Stope grasped thewheelbox. "Free!" she said again with shining eyes. 

The yacht rose more sharply, hung on a wave's crest and slid lightlydownward. Woolfolk, with a sinewy, dark hand directing their course, was intent upon the swelling sails. Once he stopped, tightening ahalyard, and the sailor said:

"The main peak won't flatten, sir. "

The swells grew larger. The _Gar_ climbed their smooth heights andcoasted like a feather beyond. Directly before the yacht they wereunbroken, but on either side they foamed into a silver quicklyreabsorbed in the deeper water within the bar. 

Woolfolk turned from his scrutiny of the ketch to his companion, andwas surprised to see her, with all the joy evaporated from hercountenance, clinging rigidly to the rail. He said to himself, "Seasick. " Then he realized that it was not a physical illness thatpossessed her, but a profound, increasing terror. She endeavored tosmile back at his questioning gaze, and said in a small, uncertainvoice:

"It's so--so big!"

For a moment he saw in her a clear resemblance to the shrinking figureof Lichfield Stope. It was as though suddenly she had lost her fineprofile and become indeterminate, shadowy. The grey web of the olddeflection in Virginia extended over her out of the past--of the pastthat, Woolfolk thought, would not die. 

The _Gar_ rose higher still, dropped into the deep, watery valley, andthe woman's face was drawn and wet, the back of her straining hand wasdead white. Without further delay John Woolfolk put the wheel sharplyover and told his man, "We're going about. " Halvard busied himselfwith the shaking sails. 

"Really--I'd rather you didn't, " Millie gasped. "I must learn ... Nolonger a child. "

But Woolfolk held the ketch on her return course; his companion'spanic was growing beyond her control. They passed once more betweenthe broken waves and entered the still bay with its border offlowering earth. There, when the yacht had been anchored, Millie satgazing silently at the open sea whose bigness had so unexpectedlydistressed her. Her face was pinched, her mouth set in a straight, hard line. That, somehow, suggested to Woolfolk the enigmaticgoverness; it was in contradiction to the rest. 

"How strange, " she said at last in an insuperably weary voice, "to beforced back to this place that I loathe, by myself, by my owncowardice. It's exactly as if my spirit were chained--then the bodycould never be free. What is it, " she demanded of John Woolfolk, "thatlives in our own hearts and betrays our utmost convictions andefforts, and destroys us against all knowledge and desire?"

"It may be called heredity, " he replied; "that is its simplest phase. The others extend into the realms of the fantastic. "

"It's unjust, " she cried bitterly, "to be condemned to die in a pitwith all one's instinct in the sky!"

The old plea of injustice quivered for a moment over the water andthen died away. John Woolfolk had made the same passionate protest, hehad cried it with clenched hands at the withdrawn stars, and theprofound inattention of Nature had appalled his agony. A thrill ofpity moved him for the suffering woman beside him. Her mouth was stillunrelaxed. There was in her the material for a struggle against theinvidious past. 

In her slender frame the rebellion took on an accent of the heroic. Woolfolk recalled how utterly he had gone down before mischance. Buthis case had been extreme, he had suffered an unendurable wrong at thehand of Fate. Halvard diverted his thoughts by placing before them atray of sugared pineapple and symmetrical cakes. Millie, too, lost hertension; she showed a feminine pleasure at the yacht's fine napkins, approved the polish of the glass. 

"It's all quite wonderful, " she said. 

"I have nothing else to care for, " Woolfolk told her. 

"No place nor people on land?"

"None. "

"And you are satisfied?"

"Absolutely, " he replied with an unnecessary emphasis. He was, he toldhimself aggressively; he wanted nothing more from living and hadnothing to give. Yet his pity for Millie Stope mounted obscurely, bringing with it thoughts, dim obligations and desires, to which hehad declared himself dead. 

"I wonder if you are to be envied?" she queried. 

A sudden astounding willingness to speak of himself, even of the past, swept over him. 

"Hardly, " he replied. "All the things that men value were killed forme in an instant, in the flutter of a white skirt. "

"Can you talk about it?"

"There's almost nothing to tell; it was so unrelated, so senseless andblind. It can't be dressed into a story, it has no moral--no meaning. Well--it was twelve years ago. I had just been married, and we hadgone to a property in the country. After two days I had to go intotown, and when I came back Ellen met me in a breaking cart. It was aflag station, buried in maples, with a white road winding back towhere we were staying. 

"Ellen had trouble in holding the horse when the train left, and thebeast shied going from the station. It was Monday, clothes hung from aline in a side yard and a skirt fluttered in a little breeze. Thehorse reared, the strapped back of the seat broke, and Ellen wasthrown--on her head. It killed her. "

He fell silent. Millie breathed sharply, and a ripple struck with afaint slap on the yacht's side. Then: "One can't allow that, " hecontinued in a lower voice, as if arguing with himself; "arbitrary, wanton; impossible to accept such conditions----

"She was young, " he once more took up the narrative; "a girl in atennis skirt with a gay scarf about her waist--quite dead in a second. The clothes still fluttered on the line. You see, " he ended, "nothinginstructive, tragic--only a crude dissonance. "

"Then you left everything?"

He failed to answer, and she gazed with a new understanding andinterest over the _Gar_. Her attention was attracted to the beach, and, following her gaze, John Woolfolk saw the bulky figure ofNicholas gazing at them from under his palm. A palpable change, aswift shadow, enveloped Millie Stope. 

"I must go back, " she said uneasily; "there will be dinner, and myfather has been alone all morning. "

But Woolfolk was certain that, however convincing the reasons she putforward, it was none of these that was taking her so hurriedly ashore. The dread that for the past few hours had almost vanished from hertones, her gaze, had returned multiplied. It was, he realized, theobjective fear; her entire being was shrinking as if in anticipationof an imminent calamity, a physical blow. 

Woolfolk himself put her on the beach; and, with the tender canted onthe sand, steadied her spring. As her hand rested on his arm itgripped him with a sharp force; a response pulsed through his body;and an involuntary color rose in her pale, fine cheeks. 

Nicholas, stolidly set with his shoes half buried in the sand, surveyed them without a shade of feeling on his thick countenance. ButWoolfolk saw that the other's fingers were crawling toward his pocket. He realized that the man's dully smiling mask concealed sultry, ungoverned emotions, blind springs of hate. 

VII

Again on the ketch the inevitable reaction overtook him. He had spokenof Ellen's death to no one until now, through all the years when hehad been a wanderer on the edge of his world, and he bitterlyregretted his reference to it. In speaking he had betrayed hisresolution of solitude. Life, against all his instinct, his wishes, had reached out and caught him, however lightly, in its tentacles. 

The least surrender, he realized, the slightest opening of hisinterest, would bind him with a multitude of attachments; the octopusthat he dreaded, uncoiling arm after arm, would soon hold him again, ahelpless victim for the fury Chance. 

He had made a disastrous error in following his curiosity, theinsistent scent of the wild oranges, to the house where Millie hadadvanced on the dim portico. His return there had been the inevitableresult of the first mistake, and the rest had followed with a fatalease. Whatever had been the deficiences of the past twelve years hehad been free from new complications, fresh treacheries. Now, withhardly a struggle, he was falling back into the old trap. 

The wind died away absolutely, and a haze gathered delicately over thesea, thickening through the afternoon, and turned rosy by thedeclining sun. The shore had faded from sight. 

A sudden energy leaped through John Woolfolk and rang out in an abruptsummons to Halvard. "Get up anchor, " he commanded. 

Poul Halvard, at the mainstay, remarked tentatively: "There's not acapful of wind. "

The wide calm, Woolfolk thought, was but a part of a generalconspiracy against his liberty, his memories. "Get the anchor up, " herepeated harshly. "We'll go under the engine. " The sudden jarring ofthe _Gar's_ engine sounded muffled in a shut space like the flushedheart of a shell. The yacht moved forward, with a wake like foldedgauze, into a shimmer of formless and pure color. 

John Woolfolk sat at the wheel, motionless except for an occasionalscant shifting of his hands. He was sailing by compass; the patentlog, trailing behind on its long cord, maintained a constant, jerkingregister on its dial. He had resolutely banished all thought save thatof navigation. Halvard was occupied forward, clearing the deck of theaccumulations of the anchorage. When he came aft Woolfolk saidshortly: "No mess. "

The haze deepened and night fell, and the sailor lighted and placedthe port and starboard lights. The binnacle lamp threw up a dim, orange radiance on Woolfolk's somber countenance. He continued forthree and four and then five hours at the wheel, while the smoothclamor of the engine, a slight quiver of the hull, alone marked theirprogress through an invisible element. 

Once more he had left life behind. This had more the aspect of aflight than at any time previous. It was, obscurely, an unpleasantthought, and he endeavored--unsuccessfully--to put it from him. He wasbut pursuing the course he had laid out, following his necessary, inflexible determination. 

His mind for a moment turned independently back to Millie with herdouble burden of fear. He had left her without a word, isolated withNicholas, concealing with a blank smile his enigmatic being, and withher impotent parent. 

Well, he was not responsible for her, he had paid for the privilege ofimmunity; he had but listened to her story, volunteering nothing. JohnWoolfolk wished, however, that he had said some final, useful word toher before going. He was certain that, looking for the ketch andunexpectedly finding the bay empty, she would suffer a pang, if onlyof loneliness. In the short while that he had been there she had cometo depend on him for companionship, for relief from the insuperablemonotony of her surroundings; for, perhaps, still more. He wonderedwhat that more might contain. He thought of Millie at the presentmoment, probably lying awake, steeped in dread. His flight now assumedthe aspect of an act of cowardice, of desertion. He rehearsed wearilythe extenuations of his position, but without any palpable relief. 

An even more disturbing possibility lodged in his thoughts--he was notcertain that he did not wish to be actually back with Millie again. Hefelt the quick pressure of her fingers on his arm as she jumped fromthe tender; her magnetic personality hung about him like an aroma. Cloaked in mystery, pale and irresistible, she appealed to him fromthe edge of the wild oranges. 

This, he told himself again, was but the manner in which a ruthlessNature set her lures; it was the deceptive vestment of romance. Heheld the ketch relentlessly on her course, with--now--all histhoughts, his inclinations, returning to Millie Stope. In a final, desperate rally of his scattering resolution he told himself that hewas unfaithful to the tragic memory of Ellen. This last stay brokeabruptly, and left him defenseless against the tyranny of his mountingdesires. Strangely he felt the sudden pressure of a stirring wind uponhis face; and, almost with an oath, he put the wheel sharply over andthe _Gar_ swung about. 

Poul Halvard had been below, by inference asleep; but when the yachtchanged her course he immediately appeared on deck. He moved aft, butWoolfolk made no explanation, the sailor put no questions. The windfreshened, grew sustained. Woolfolk said:

"Make sail. "

Soon after, the mainsail rose, a ghostly white expanse on the night. John Woolfolk trimmed the jigger, shut off the engine; and, movingthrough a sudden, vast hush, they retraced their course. The bay wasablaze with sunlight, the morning well advanced, when the ketchfloated back to her anchorage under the oleanders. 

VIII

Whether he returned or fled, Woolfolk thought, he was enveloped in anatmosphere of defeat. He relinquished the wheel, but remained seated, drooping at his post. The indefatigable Halvard proceeded with theefficient discharge of his narrow, exacting duties. After a shortspace John Woolfolk descended to the cabin, where, on an unmade berth, he fell immediately asleep. 

He woke to a dim interior and twilight gathering outside. Heshaved--without conscious purpose--with meticulous care, and put onthe blue flannel coat. Later he rowed himself ashore and proceededdirectly through the orange grove to the house beyond. 

Millie Stope was seated on the portico, and laid a restraining hand onher father's arm as he rose, attempting to retreat at Woolfolk'sapproach. The latter, with a commonplace greeting, resumed his place. 

Millie's face was dim and potent in the gloom, and Lichfield Stopemore than ever resembled an uneasy ghost. He muttered an indistinctresponse to a period directed at him by Woolfolk and turned with alow, urgent appeal to his daughter. The latter, with a hopelessgesture, relinquished his arm, and the other vanished. 

"You were sailing this morning, " Millie commented listlessly. 

"I had gone, " he said without explanation. Then he added: "But I cameback. "

A silence threatened them which he resolutely broke: "Do you remember, when you told me about your father, that you wanted really to talkabout yourself? Will you do that now?"

"Tonight I haven't the courage. "

"I am not idly curious, " he persisted. 

"Just what are you?"

"I don't know, " he admitted frankly. "At the present moment I'm lost, fogged. But, meanwhile, I'd like to give you any assistance in mypower. You seem, in a mysterious way, needful of help. "

She turned her head sharply in the direction of the open hall and saidin a high, clear voice, that yet rang strangely false: "I am quitewell cared for by my father and Nicholas. " She moved closer to him, dragging her chair across the uneven porch, in the rasp of which sheadded, quick and low:

"Don't--please. "

A mounting exasperation seized him at the secrecy that veiled her, hidher from him, and he answered stiffly: "I am merely intrusive. "

She was seated above him, and she leaned forward and swiftly pressedhis fingers, loosely clasped about a knee. Her hand was as cold assalt. His irritation vanished before a welling pity. He got now asharp, recognized happiness from her nearness; his feeling for herincreased with the accumulating seconds. After the surrender, theadmission, of his return he had grown elemental, sensitized toemotions rather than to processes of intellect. His ardor had thepoignancy of the period beyond youth. It had a trace of theconsciousness of the fatal waning of life which gave it a depth deniedto younger passions. He wished to take Millie Stope at once from allmemory of the troublous past, to have her alone in a totally differentand thrilling existence. 

It was a personal and blind desire, born in the unaccustomed tumult ofhis newly released feelings. 

They sat for a long while, silent or speaking in trivialities, when heproposed a walk to the sea; but she declined in that curiously loudand false tone. It seemed to Woolfolk that, for the moment, she hadaddressed someone not immediately present; and involuntarily he lookedaround. The light of the hidden lamp in the hall fell in a pale, unbroken rectangle on the irregular porch. There was not the shiftingof a pound's weight audible in the stillness. 

Millie breathed unevenly; at times he saw she shivered uncontrollably. At this his feeling mounted beyond all restraint. He said, taking hercold hand: "I didn't tell you why I went last night--it was because Iwas afraid to stay where you were; I was afraid of the change you werebringing about in my life. That's all over now, I----"

"Isn't it quite late?" she interrupted him uncomfortably. She rose andher agitation visibly increased. 

He was about to force her to hear all that he must say, but he stoppedat the mute wretchedness of her pallid face. He stood gazing up at herfrom the rough sod. She clenched her hands, her breast heaved sharply, and she spoke in a level, strained voice:

"It would have been better if you had gone--without coming back. Myfather is unhappy with anyone about except myself--and Nicholas. Yousee--he will not stay on the porch nor walk about his grounds. I amnot in need of assistance, as you seem to think. And--thank you. Goodnight. "

He stood without moving, his head thrown back, regarding her with asearching frown. He listened again, unconsciously, and thought heheard the low creaking of a board from within. It could be nothing butthe uneasy peregrination of Lichfield Stope. The sound was repeated, grew louder, and the sagging bulk of Nicholas appeared in thedoorway. 

The latter stood for a moment, a dark, magnified shape; and then, moving across the portico to the farthest window, closed the shutters. The hinges gave out a rasping grind, as if they had not been turnedfor months, and there was a faint rattle of falling particles ofrusted iron. The man forced shut a second set of shutters with asudden violence and went slowly back into the house. Millie Stope saidonce more:

"Good night. "

It was evident to Woolfolk that he could gain nothing more at present;and stifling an angry protest, an impatient troop of questions, heturned and strode back to the tender. However, he hadn't the slightestintention of following Millie's indirectly expressed wish for him toleave. He had the odd conviction that at heart she did not want him togo; the evening, he elaborated this feeling, had been all a strangepiece of acting. Tomorrow he would tear apart the veil that hid herfrom him; he would ignore her every protest and force the truth fromher. 

He lifted the tender's anchor from the sand and pulled sharply acrossthe water to the _Gar_. A reddish, misshapen moon hung in the east, and when he had mounted to his deck it was suddenly obscured by ahigh, racing scud of cloud; the air had a damper, thicker feel. Heinstinctively moved to the barometer, which he found depressed. Thewind, that had continued steadily since the night before, increased, and there was a corresponding stir among the branches ashore, aslapping of the yacht's cordage against the spars. He turned forwardand half absently noted the increasing strain on the hawserdisappearing into the dark tide. The anchor was firmly bedded. Thepervasive far murmur of the waves on the outer bars grew louder. 

The yacht swung lightly over the choppy water, and a strong affectionfor the ketch that had been his home, his occupation, his solacethrough the past dreary years expanded his heart. He knew the _Gar's_every capability and mood, and they were all good. She was anexceptional boat. His feeling was acute, for he knew that the yachthad been superseded. It was already an element of the past, of thatpast in which Ellen lay dead in a tennis skirt, with a bright scarfabout her young waist. 

He placed his hand on the mainmast, in the manner in which anothermight drop a palm on the shoulder of a departing faithful companion, and the wind in the rigging vibrated through the wood like a sentientand affectionate response. Then he went resolutely down into thecabin, facing the future. 

John Woolfolk woke in the night, listened for a moment to thestraining hull and wind shrilling aloft, and then rose and wentforward again to examine the mooring. A second hawser now reached intothe darkness. Halvard had been on deck and put out another anchor. Thewind beat salt and stinging from the sea, utterly dissipating thelanguorous breath of the land, the odors of the exotic, floweringtrees. 

IX

In the morning a storm, driving out of the east, enveloped the coastin a frigid, lashing rain. The wind mounted steadily through themiddle of the day with an increasing pitch accompanied by the basso ofthe racing seas. The bay grew opaque and seamed with white scars. After the meridian the rain ceased, but the wind maintained itsvolume, clamoring beneath a leaden pall. 

John Woolfolk, in dripping yellow oilskins, occasionally circled thedeck of his ketch. Halvard had everything in a perfection of order. When the rain stopped, the sailor dropped into the tender and with aboat sponge bailed vigorously. Soon after, Woolfolk stepped out uponthe beach. He was without any plan but the determination to put asidewhatever obstacles held Millie from him. This rapidly crystallizedinto the resolve to take her with him before another day ended. Hisfeeling for her, increasing to a passionate need, had destroyed thesuspension, the deliberate calm of his life, as the storm haddissipated the sunny peace of the coast. 

He paused before the ruined façade, weighing her statement that itwould have been better if he had not returned; and he wondered howthat would affect her willingness, her ability, to see him today. Headded the word "ability" instinctively and without explanation. And hedecided that, in order to have any satisfactory speech with her, hemust come upon her alone, away from the house. Then he could force herto hear to the finish what he wanted to say; in the open they mightescape from the inexplicable inhibition that lay upon her expressionof feeling, of desire. It would be necessary, at the same time, toavoid the notice of anyone who would warn her of his presence. Thisprecluded his waiting at the familiar place on the rotting wharf. 

Three marble steps, awry and moldy, descended to the lawn from aFrench window in the side of the desolate mansion. They werescreened by a tangle of rose-mallow, and there John Woolfolk seatedhimself--waiting. 

The wind shrilled about the corner of the house; there was a mournfulclatter of shingles from above and the frenzied lashing of boughs. Thenoise was so great that he failed to hear the slightest indication ofthe approach of Nicholas until that individual passed directly beforehim. Nicholas stopped at the inner fringe of the beach and, from apoint where he could not be seen from the ketch, stood gazing out atthe _Gar_ pounding on her long anchor chains. The man remained for anoppressively extended period; Woolfolk could see his heavy, droopingshoulders and sunken head; and then the other moved to the left, crossing the rough open behind the oleanders. Woolfolk had a momentaryglimpse of a huge nose and rapidly moving lips above an impotentchin. 

Nicholas, he realized, remained a complete enigma to him; beyond theconviction that the man was, in some minor way, leaden-witted, he knewnothing. 

A brief, watery ray of sunlight fell through a rift in the flyingclouds and stained the tossing foliage pale gold; it was followed by asudden drift of rain, then once more the naked wind. Woolfolk was fastdetermining to go up to the house and insist upon Millie's hearinghim, when unexpectedly she appeared in a somber, fluttering cloak, with her head uncovered and hair blown back from her pale brow. Hewaited until she had passed him, and then rose, softly calling hername. 

She stopped and turned, with a hand pressed to her heart. "I wasafraid you'd gone out, " she told him. "The sea is like a pack ofwolves. " Her voice was a low complexity of relief and fear. 

"Not alone, " he replied; "not without you. "

"Madness, " she murmured, gathering her wavering cloak about herbreast. She swayed, graceful as a reed in the wind, charged withpotency. He made an involuntary gesture toward her with his arms; butin a sudden accession of fear she eluded him. 

"We must talk, " he told her. "There is a great deal that needsexplaining, that--I think--I have a right to know, the right of yourdependence on something to save you from yourself. There is anotherright, but only you can give that----"

"Indeed, " she interrupted tensely, "you mustn't stand here talking tome. "

"I shall allow nothing to interrupt us, " he returned decidedly. "Ihave been long enough in the dark. "

"But you don't understand what you will, perhaps, bring on yourself--onme. "

"I'm forced to ignore even that last. "

She glanced hurriedly about. "Not here then, if you must. "

She walked from him, toward the second ruined pile that fronted thebay. The steps to the gaping entrance had rotted away and they wereforced to mount an insecure side piece. The interior, as Woolfolk hadseen, was composed of one high room, while, above, a narrow, opensecond story hung like a ledge. On both sides were long counters withmounting sets of shelves behind them. 

"This was the store, " Millie told him. "It was a great estate. "

A dim and moldering fragment of cotton stuff was hanging from aforgotten bolt; above, some tinware was eaten with rust; a scale hadcrushed in the floor and lay broken on the earth beneath; and aledger, its leaves a single, sodden film of grey, was still open on acounter. A precarious stair mounted to the flooring above, and MillieStope made her way upward, followed by Woolfolk. 

There, in the double gloom of the clouds and a small dormer windowobscured by cobwebs, she sank on a broken box. The decayed walls shookperilously in the blasts of the wind. Below they could see the emptyfloor, and through the doorway the somber, gleaming greenery without. 

All the patient expostulation that John Woolfolk had prepareddisappeared in a sudden tyranny of emotion, of hunger for the slender, weary figure before him. Seating himself at her side, he burst into atorrential expression of passionate desire that mounted with the tideof his eager words. He caught her hands, held them in a painful grip, and gazed down into her still, frightened face. He stopped abruptly, was silent for a tempestuous moment, and then baldly repeated the factof his love. 

Millie Stope said:

"I know so little about the love you mean. " Her voice trailed tosilence; and in a lull of the storm they heard the thin patter of ratson the floor below, the stir of bats among the rafters. 

"It's quickly learned, " he assured her. "Millie, do you feel anyresponse at all in your heart--the slightest return of my longing?"

"I don't know, " she answered, turning toward him a troubled scrutiny. "Perhaps in another surrounding, with things different, I might carefor you very much----"

"I am going to take you into that other surrounding, " he announced. 

She ignored his interruption. "But we shall never have a chance tolearn. " She silenced his attempted protest with a cool, flexible palmagainst his mouth. "Life, " she continued, "is so dreadfully in thedark. One is lost at the beginning. There are maps to take you safelyto the Guianas, but none for souls. Perhaps religions are----Again Idon't know. I have found nothing secure--only a whirlpool into which Iwill not drag others. "

"I will drag you out, " he asserted. 

She smiled at him, in a momentary tenderness, and continued: "When Iwas young I never doubted that I would conquer life. I pictured myselfrising in triumph over circumstance, as a gull leaves the sea.... WhenI was young.... If I was afraid of the dark then I thought, of course, I would outgrow it; but it has grown deeper than my courage. The nightis terrible now. " A shiver passed over her. 

"You are ill, " he insisted, "but you shall be cured. "

"Perhaps, a year ago, something might have been done, with assistance;yes--with you. Then, whatever is, hadn't materialized. Why did youdelay?" she cried in a sudden suffering. 

"You'll go with me tonight, " he declared stoutly. 

"In this?" She indicated the wind beating with the blows of a greatfist against the swaying sides of the demolished store. "Have you seenthe sea? Do you remember what happened on the day I went with you whenit was so beautiful and still?"

John Woolfolk realized, wakened to a renewed mental clearness bythe threatening of all that he desired, that--as Millie hadintimated--life was too complicated to be solved by a simplelonging; love was not the all-powerful magician of conventionalacceptance; there were other, no less profound, depths. 

He resolutely abandoned his mere inchoate wanting, and considered theelements of the position that were known to him. There was, in thefirst place, that old, lamentable dereliction of Lichfield Stope's, and its aftermath in his daughter. Millie had just recalled toWoolfolk the duration, the activity, of its poison. Here there was nopossibility of escape by mere removal; the stain was within; and itmust be thoroughly cleansed before she could cope successfully, happily, with life. In this, he was forced to acknowledge, he couldhelp her but little; it was an affair of spirit; and spiritualvalues--though they might be supported from without--had their growthand decrease strictly in the individual they animated. 

Still, he argued, a normal existence, a sense of security, wouldaccomplish a great deal; and that in turn hung upon the elimination ofthe second, unknown element--the reason for her backward glances, hersudden, loud banalities, yesterday's mechanical repudiation of hisoffered assistance and the implied wish for him to go. He saidgravely:

"I have been impatient, but you came so sharply into my emptyexistence that I was upset. If you are ill you can cure yourself. Never forget your mother's 'brave heart. ' But there is somethingobjective, immediate, threatening you. Tell me what it is, Millie, andtogether we will overcome and put it away from you for ever. "

She gazed panic-stricken into the empty gloom below. "No! no!" sheexclaimed, rising. "You don't know. I won't drag you down. You must goaway at once, tonight, even in the storm. "

"What is it?" he demanded. 

She stood rigidly erect with her eyes shut and hands clasped at hersides. Then she slid down upon the box, lifting to him a white mask offright. 

"It's Nicholas, " she said, hardly above her breath. 

A sudden relief swept over John Woolfolk. In his mind he dismissed asnegligible the heavy man fumbling beneath his soiled apron. Hewondered how the other could have got such a grip on Millie Stope'simagination. 

The mystery that had enveloped her was fast disappearing, leaving themwithout an obstacle to the happiness he proposed. Woolfolk saidcurtly:

"Has Nicholas been annoying you?"

She shivered, with clasped straining hands. 

"He says he's crazy about me, " she told him in a shuddering voice thatcontracted his heart. "He says that I must--must marry him, or----"Her period trailed abruptly out to silence. 

Woolfolk grew animated with determination, an immediate purpose. 

"Where would Nicholas be at this hour?" he asked. 

She rose hastily, clinging to his arm. "You mustn't, " she exclaimed, yet not loudly. "You don't know! He is watching--something frightfulwould happen. "

"Nothing 'frightful, '" he returned tolerantly, preparing to descend. "Only unfortunate for Nicholas. "

"You mustn't, " she repeated desperately, her sheer weight hanging fromher hands clasped about his neck. "Nicholas is not--not human. There'ssomething funny about him. I don't mean funny, I----"

He unclasped her fingers and quietly forced her back to the seat onthe box. Then he took a place at her side. 

"Now, " he asked reasonably, "what is this about Nicholas?"

She glanced down into the desolate cavern of the store; the ghostlyremnant of cotton goods fluttered in a draft like a torn and grimycobweb; the lower floor was palpably bare. 

"He came in April, " she commenced in a voice without any life. "Thewoman we had had for years was dead; and when Nicholas asked for workwe were glad to take him. He wanted the smallest possible wages andwas willing to do everything; he even cooked quite nicely. At first hewas jumpy--he had asked if many strangers went by; but then when noone appeared he got easier.... He got easier and began to do extrathings for me. I thanked him--until I understood. Then I asked fatherto send him away, but he was afraid; and, before I could get up mycourage to do it, Nicholas spoke----

"He said he was crazy about me, and would I please try and be good tohim. He had always wanted to marry, he went on, and live right, butthings had gone against him. I told him that he was impertinent andthat he would have to go at once; but he cried and begged me not tosay that, not to get him 'started. '"

That, John Woolfolk recalled, was precisely what the man had said tohim. 

"I went back to father and told him why he must send Nicholas off, butfather nearly suffocated. He turned almost black. Then I gotfrightened and locked myself in my room, while Nicholas sat out on thestair and sobbed all night. It was ghastly! In the morning I had to godown, and he went about his duties as usual. 

"That evening he spoke again, on the porch, twisting his hands exactlyas if he were making bread. He repeated that he wanted me to be niceto him. He said something wrong would happen if I pushed him to it. 

"I think if he had threatened to kill me it would have been morepossible than his hints and sobs. The thing went along for a month, then six weeks, and nothing more happened. I started again and againto tell them at the store, two miles back in the pines, but I couldnever get away from Nicholas; he was always at my shoulder, mutteringand twisting his hands. 

"At last I found something. " She hesitated, glancing once more downthrough the empty gloom, while her fingers swiftly fumbled in the bandof her waist. 

"I was cleaning his room--it simply had to be done--and had out abureau drawer, when I saw this underneath. He was not in the house, and I took one look at it, then put the things back as near aspossible as they were. I was so frightened that I slipped it in mydress--had no chance to return it. "

He took from her unresisting hand a folded rectangle of coarse greypaper; and, opening it, found a small handbill with the crudelyreproduced photograph of a man's head with a long, drooping nose, sleepy eyes in thick folds of flesh, and a lax under-lip with a fixed, dull smile:

 WANTED FOR MURDER!

 The authorities of Coweta offer THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS for the apprehension of the below, Iscah Nicholas, convicted of the murder of Elizabeth Slakto, an aged woman. 

 General description: Age about forty-eight. Head receding, with large nose and stupid expression. Body corpulent but strong. Nicholas has no trade and works at general utility. He is a homicidal maniac. 

 WANTED FOR MURDER!

"He told me that his name was Nicholas Brandt, " Millie noted in herdull voice. 

A new gravity possessed John Woolfolk. 

"You must not go back to the house, " he decided. 

"Wait, " she replied. "I was terribly frightened when he went up to hisroom. When he came down he thanked me for cleaning it. I told him hewas mistaken, that I hadn't been in there, but I could see he wassuspicious. He cried all the time he was cooking dinner, in a queer, choked way; and afterward touched me--on the arm. I swam, but all thewater in the bay wouldn't take away the feel of his fingers. Then Isaw the boat--you came ashore. 

"Nicholas was dreadfully upset, and hid in the pines for a day ormore. He told me if I spoke of him it would happen, and if I left itwould happen--to father. Then he came back. He said that youwere--were in love with me, and that I must send you away. He addedthat you must go today, for he couldn't stand waiting any more. Hesaid that he wanted to be right, but that things were against him. This morning he got dreadful--if I fooled him he'd get you, and me, too, and then there was always father for something extra special. That, he warned me, would happen if I stayed away for more than anhour. " She rose, trembling violently. "Perhaps it's been an hour now. I must go back. "

John Woolfolk thought rapidly; his face was grim. If he had brought apistol from the ketch he would have shot Iscah Nicholas withouthesitation. Unarmed, he was reluctant to precipitate a crisis withsuch serious possibilities. He could secure one from the _Gar_, buteven that short lapse of time might prove fatal--to Millie orLichfield Stope. Millie's story was patently fact in every detail. Hethought more rapidly still--desperately. 

"I must go back, " she repeated, her words lost in a sudden blast ofwind under the dilapidated roof. 

He saw that she was right. 

"Very well, " he acquiesced. "Tell him that you saw me, and that Ipromised to go tonight. Act quietly; say that you have been upset, butthat you will give him an answer tomorrow. Then at eight o'clock--itwill be dark early tonight--walk out to the wharf. That is all. But itmust be done without any hesitation; you must be even cheerful, kinderto him. "

He was thinking: She must be out of the way when I meet Nicholas. Shemust not be subjected to the ordeal that will release her from thedread fast crushing her spirit. 

She swayed, and he caught her, held her upright, circled in his steadyarms. 

"Don't let him hurt us, " she gasped. "Oh, don't!"

"Not now, " he reassured her. "Nicholas is finished. But you must helpby doing exactly as I have told you. You'd better go on. It won't belong, hardly three hours, until freedom. "

She laid her cold cheek against his face, while her arms crept roundhis neck. She said nothing; and he held her to him with a sudden throbof feeling. They stood for a moment in the deepening gloom, bound in astraining embrace, while the rats gnawed in the sagging walls of thestore and the storm thrashed without. She reluctantly descended thestair, crossed the broken floor and disappeared through the door. 

A sudden unwillingness to have her return alone to the sobbing menaceof Iscah Nicholas, the impotent wraith that had been Lichfield Stope, carried him in an impetuous stride to the stair. But there he halted. The plan he had made held, in its simplicity, a larger measure ofsafety than any immediate, unconsidered course. 

John Woolfolk waited until she had had time to enter the orange-grove;then he followed, turning toward the beach. 

He found Halvard already at the sand's edge, waiting uneasily with thetender, and they crossed the broken water to where the _Gar's_ cabinflung out a remote, peaceful light. 

X

The sailor immediately set about his familiar, homely tasks, whileWoolfolk made a minute inspection of the ketch's rigging. He descendedto supper with an expression of abstraction, and ate mechanicallywhatever was placed before him. Afterward he rolled a cigarette, whichhe neglected to light, and sat motionless, chin on breast, in the warmstillness. 

Halvard cleared the table and John Woolfolk roused himself. He turnedto the shelf that ran above the berths and secured a small, locked tinbox. For an hour or more he was engaged alternately writing andcarefully reading various papers sealed with vermilion wafers. Then hecalled Halvard. 

"I'll get you to witness these signatures, " he said, rising. PoulHalvard hesitated; then, with a furrowed brow, clumsily grasped thepen. "Here, " Woolfolk indicated. The man wrote slowly, linkingfortuitously the unsteady letters of his name. This arduous taskaccomplished, he immediately rose. John Woolfolk again took his place, turning to address the other, when he saw that one side of Halvard'sface was bluish and rapidly swelling. 

"What's the matter with your jaw?" he promptly inquired. 

Halvard avoided his gaze, obviously reluctant to speak, but Woolfolk'ssilent interrogation was insistent. Then:

"I met that Nicholas, " Halvard admitted; "without a knife. "

"Well?" Woolfolk insisted. 

"There's something wrong with this cursed place, " Halvard saiddefiantly. "You can laugh, but there's a matter in the air that's notnatural. My grandmother could have named it. She heard the ravens thatcalled Tollfsen's death, and read Linga's eyes before she strangulatedherself. Anyhow, when you didn't come back I got doubtful and took thetender in. Then I saw Nicholas beating up through the bushes, hidinghere and there, and doubling through the grass; so I came on him fromthe back and--and kicked him, quite sudden. 

"He went on his hands, but got up quick for a hulk like himself. Sir, this is hard to believe, but it's Biblical--he didn't take any morenotice of the kick than if it had been a flag halyard brushed againsthim. He said 'Go away, ' and waved his foolish hands. 

"I closed in, still careful of the knife, with a remark, and got ontohis heart. He only coughed and kept telling me in a crying whisper togo away. Nicholas pushed me back--that's how I got this face. What wasthe use? I might as well have hit a pudding. Even talk didn't movehim. In a little it sent me cold. " He stopped abruptly, grew sullen;it was evident that he would say no more in that direction. Woolfolkopened another subject:

"Life, Halvard, " he said, "is uncertain; perhaps tonight I shall findit absolutely unreliable. What I am getting at is this: if anythinghappens to me--death, to be accurate--the _Gar_ is yours, the ketchand a sum of money. It is secured to you in this box, which you willdeliver to my address in Boston. There is another provision that I'llmention merely to give you the opportunity to repeat it verbally frommy lips: the bulk of anything I have, in the possibility we areconsidering, will go to a Miss Stope, the daughter of Lichfield Stope, formerly of Virginia. " He stood up. "Halvard, " Woolfolk said abruptly, extending his hand, expressing for the first time his repeatedthought, "you are a good man. You are the only steady quantity I haveever known. I have paid you for a part of this, but the most is beyonddollars. That I am now acknowledging. "

Halvard was cruelly embarrassed. He waited, obviously desiring achance to retreat, and Woolfolk continued in a different vein:

"I want the canvas division rigged across the cabin and three berthsmade. Then get the yacht ready to go out at any time. "

One thing more remained; and, going deeper into the tin box, JohnWoolfolk brought out a packet of square envelopes addressed to him ina faded, angular hand. They were all that remained now of his youth, of the past. Not a ghost, not a remembered fragrance nor accent, rosefrom the delicate paper. They had been the property of a man deadtwelve years ago, slain by incomprehensible mischance; and the man inthe contracted cabin, vibrating from the elemental and violent forceswithout, forebore to open them. He burned the packet to a blackish ashon a plate. 

It was, he saw from the chronometer, seven o'clock; and he rosecharged with tense energy, engaged in activities of a far differentorder. He unwrapped from many folds of oiled silk a flat, amorphouspistol, uglier in its bleak outline than the familiar weapons of moregraceful days; and, sliding into place a filled cartridge clip, hethrew a load into the barrel. This he deposited in the pocket of ablack wool jacket, closely buttoned about his long, hard body, andwent up on deck. 

Halvard, in a glistening yellow coat, came close up to him, speakingwith the wind whipping the words from his lips. He said: "She's ready, sir. "

For a moment Woolfolk made no answer; he stood gazing anxiously intothe dark that enveloped and hid Millie Stope from him. There wasanother darkness about her, thicker than the mere night, like a blackcerement dropping over her soul. His eyes narrowed as he replied tothe sailor: "Good!"

XI

John Woolfolk peered through the night toward the land. 

"Put me ashore beyond the point, " he told Halvard; "at a half-sunkwharf on the sea. "

The sailor secured the tender, and, dropping into it, held the smallboat steady while Woolfolk followed. With a vigorous push they fellaway from the _Gar_. Halvard's oars struck the water smartly andforced the tender forward into the beating wind. They made a choppypassage to the rim of the bay, where, turning, they followed the thin, pale glimmer of the broken water on the land's edge. Halvard pulledwith short, telling strokes, his oarblades stirring into momentarybeing livid blurs of phosphorescence. 

John Woolfolk guided the boat about the point where he had first seenMillie swimming. He recalled how strange her unexpected appearance hadseemed. It had, however, been no stranger than the actuality which haddriven her into the bay in the effort to cleanse the stain of IscahNicholas' touch. Woolfolk's face hardened; he was suddenly consciousof the cold weight in his pocket. He realized that he would killNicholas at the first opportunity and without the slightesthesitation. 

The tender passed about the point, and he could hear more clearly thesullen clamor of the waves on the seaward bars. The patches of greensky had grown larger, the clouds swept by with the apparent menace ofsolid, flying objects. The land lay in a low, formless mass on theleft. It appeared secretive, a masked place of evil. Its influencereached out and subtly touched John Woolfolk's heart with thepremonition of base treacheries. The tormented trees had the sound ofIscah Nicholas sobbing. He must take Millie away immediately; banishits last memory from her mind, its influence from her soul. It was thelatter he always feared, which formed his greatest hazard--to tearfrom her the tendrils of the invidious past. 

The vague outline of the ruined wharf swam forward, and the tenderslid into the comparative quiet of its partial protection. 

"Make fast, " Woolfolk directed. "I shall be out of the boat for awhile. " He hesitated; then: "Miss Stope will be here; and if, after anhour, you hear nothing from me, take her out to the ketch for thenight. Insist on her going. If you hear nothing from me still, makethe first town and report. "

He mounted by a cross pinning to the insecure surface above; and, picking his way to solid earth, waited. He struck a match and, covering the light with his palm, saw that it was ten minutes beforeeight. Millie, he had thought, would reach the wharf before the hourhe had indicated. She would not at any cost be late. 

The night was impenetrable. Halvard was as absolutely lost as if hehad dropped, with all the world save the bare, wet spot where Woolfolkstood, into a nether region from which floated up great, shudderinggasps of agony. He followed this idea more minutely, picturing thedetails of such a terrestrial calamity; then he put it from him withan oath. Black thoughts crept insidiously into his mind like rats in acellar. He had ordinarily a rigidly disciplined brain, an incisivelogic, and he was disturbed by the distorted visions that came to himunbidden. He wished, in a momentary panic, instantly suppressed, thathe were safely away with Millie in the ketch. 

He was becoming hysterical, he told himself with compressed lips--nobetter than Lichfield Stope. The latter rose greyly in his memory, andfled across the sea, a phantom body pulsing with a veined fire likethat stirred from the nocturnal bay. He again consulted his watch, andsaid aloud, incredulously: "Five minutes past eight. " The inchoatecrawling of his thoughts changed to an acute, tangible doubt, amounting dread. 

He rehearsed the details of his plan, tried it at every turning. Ithad seemed to him at the moment of its birth the best--no, theonly--thing to do, and it was still without obvious fault. Sometrivial happening, an unforeseen need of her father's, had delayedMillie for a minute or two. But the minutes increased and she did notappear. All his conflicting emotions merged into a cold passion ofanger. He would kill Nicholas without a word's preliminary. The timedrew out, Millie did not materialize, and his anger sank to therealization of appalling possibilities. 

He decided that he would wait no longer. In the act of moving forwardhe thought he heard, rising thinly against the fluctuating wind, asudden cry. He stopped automatically, listening with every nerve, butthere was no repetition of the uncertain sound. As Woolfolk swiftlyconsidered it he was possessed by the feeling that he had not heardthe cry with his actual ear but with a deeper, more unaccountablesense. He went forward in a blind rush, feeling with extended handsfor the opening in the tangle, groping a stumbling way through theclose dark of the matted trees. He fell over an exposed root, blundered into a chill, wet trunk, and finally emerged at the side ofthe desolate mansion. Here his way led through saw grass, waist high, and the blades cut at him like lithe, vindictive knives. No lightshowed from the face of the house toward him, and he came abruptlyagainst the bay window of the dismantled billiard room. 

A sudden caution arrested him--the sound of his approach mightprecipitate a catastrophe, and he soundlessly felt his passage aboutthe house to the portico. The steps creaked beneath his careful tread, but the noise was lost in the wind. At first he could see no light;the hall door, he discovered, was closed; then he was aware of a faintglimmer seeping through a drawn window shade on the right. Fromwithout he could distinguish nothing. He listened, but not a soundrose. The stillness was more ominous than cries. 

John Woolfolk took the pistol from his pocket and, automaticallyreleasing the safety, moved to the door, opening it with his lefthand. The hall was unlighted; he could feel the pressure of thedarkness above. The dank silence flowed over him like chill waterrising above his heart. He turned, and a dim thread of light, showingthrough the chink of a partly closed doorway, led him swiftly forward. He paused a moment before entering, shrinking from what might berevealed beyond, and then flung the door sharply open. 

His pistol was directed at a low-trimmed lamp in a chamber empty ofall life. He saw a row of large black portfolios on low supports, asewing bag spilled its contents from a chair, a table bore a tintobacco jar and the empty skin of a plantain. Then his gaze restedupon the floor, on a thin, inanimate body in crumpled alpaca trousersand dark jacket, with a peaked, congested face upturned toward thepale light. It was Lichfield Stope--dead. 

Woolfolk bent over him, searching for a mark of violence, for thecause of the other's death. At first he found nothing; then, as hemoved the body--its lightness came to him as a shock--he saw that onefragile arm had been twisted and broken; the hand hung like a witheredautumn leaf from its circular cuff fastened with the mosaic button. That was all. 

He straightened up sharply, with his pistol levelled at the door. Butthere had been no noise other than that of the wind plucking at theold tin roof, rattling the shrunken frames of the windows. LichfieldStope had fallen back with his countenance lying on a doubled arm, asif he were attempting to hide from his extinguished gaze the horror ofhis end. The lamp was of the common glass variety, without shade; and, in a sudden eddy of air, it flickered, threatened to go out, and athin ribbon of smoke swept up against the chimney and vanished. 

On the wall was a wide stipple print of the early nineteenthcentury--the smooth sward of a village glebe surrounded by the lowstone walls of ancient dwellings, with a timbered inn behind broadoaks and a swinging sign. It was--in the print--serenely evening, andlong shadows slipped out through an ambient glow. Woolfolk, withpistol elevated, became suddenly conscious of the withdrawn scene, andfor a moment its utter peace held him spellbound. It was anotherworld, for the security, the unattainable repose of which, he longedwith a passionate bitterness. 

The wind shifted its direction and beat upon the front of the house; adifferent set of windows rattled, and the blast swept compact and coldup through the blank hall. John Woolfolk cursed his inertia of mind, and once more addressed the profound, tragic mystery that surroundedhim. 

He thought: Nicholas has gone--with Millie. Or perhaps he has lefther--in some dark, upper space. A maddening sense of impotence settledupon him. If the man had taken Millie out into the night he had nochance of following, finding them. Impenetrable screens of bushes layon every hand, with, behind them, mile after mile of shrouded pinewoods. 

His plan had gone terribly amiss, with possibilities which he couldnot bring himself to face. All that had happened before in hislife, and that had seemed so insupportable at the time, faded toinsignificance. Shuddering waves of horror swept over him. He raisedhis hand unsteadily, drew it across his brow, and it came awaydripping wet. He was oppressed by the feeling familiar in evildreams--of gazing with leaden limbs at deliberate, unspeakable acts. 

He shook off the numbness of dread. He must act--at once! How? Athousand men could not find Iscah Nicholas in the confused darknesswithout. To raise the scattered and meager neighborhood would consumean entire day. 

The wind agitated a rocking chair in the hall, an erratic creakingresponded, and Woolfolk started forward, and stopped as he heard andthen identified the noise. This, he told himself, would not do; thehysteria was creeping over him again. He shook his shoulders, wipedhis palm and took a fresh grip on the pistol. 

Then from above came the heavy, unmistakable fall of a foot. It wasnot repeated; the silence spread once more, broken only from without. But there was no possibility of mistake, there had been no subtlety inthe sound--a slow foot had moved, a heavy body had shifted. 

At this actuality a new determination seized him; he was conscious ofa feeling that almost resembled joy, an immeasurable relief at theprospect of action and retaliation. He took up the lamp, held itelevated while he advanced to the door with a ready pistol. There, however, he stopped, realizing the mark he would present moving, conveniently illuminated, up the stair. The floor above was totallyunknown to him; at any turning he might be surprised, overcome, rendered useless. He had a supreme purpose to perform. He had already, perhaps fatally, erred, and there must be no further misstep. 

John Woolfolk realized that he must go upstairs in the dark, or with, at most, in extreme necessity, a fleeting and guarded matchlight. This, too, since he would be entirely without knowledge of hissurroundings, would be inconvenient, perhaps impossible. He must try. He put the lamp back upon the table, moving it farther out of the eddyfrom the door, where it would stay lighted against a possible pressingneed. Then he moved from the wan radiance into the night of the hall. 

XII

He formed in his mind the general aspect of the house: its width facedthe orange grove, the stair mounted on the hall's right, in back ofwhich a door gave to the billiard room; on the left was the chamber ofthe lamp, and that, he had seen, opened into a room behind, while thekitchen wing, carried to a chamber above, had been obviously added. Itwas probable that he would find the same general arrangement on thesecond floor. The hall would be smaller; a space inclosed for a bath;and a means of ascent to the roof. 

John Woolfolk mounted the stair quickly and as silently as possible, placing his feet squarely on the body of the steps. At the top thehandrail disappeared; and, with his back to a plaster wall, he moveduntil he encountered a closed door. That interior was above thebilliard room; it was on the opposite floor he had heard the footfall, and he was certain that no one had crossed the hall or closed a door. He continued, following the dank wall. At places the plaster hadfallen, and his fingers encountered the bare skeleton of the house. Farther on he narrowly escaped knocking down a heavily framedpicture--another, he thought, of Lichfield Stope's mezzotints--but hecaught it, left it hanging crazily awry. 

He passed an open door, recognized the bathroom from the flat odor ofchlorides, reached an angle of the wall and proceeded with renewedcaution. Next he encountered the cold panes of a window and then foundthe entrance to the room above the kitchen. 

He stopped--it was barely possible that the sound he heard had echoedfrom here. He revolved the wisdom of a match, but--he had progressedvery well so far--decided negatively. One aspect of the situationtroubled him greatly--the absence of any sound or warning from Millie. It was highly improbable that his entrance to the house had beenunnoticed. The contrary was probable--that his sudden appearance haddriven Nicholas above. 

Woolfolk started forward more hurriedly, urged by his increasingapprehension, when his foot went into the opening of a depressed stepand flung him sharply forward. In his instinctive effort to avoidfalling the pistol dropped clattering into the darkness. A suddenchoked cry sounded beside him, and a heavy, enveloping body fell onhis back. This sent him reeling against the wall, where he felt themuscles of an unwieldly arm tighten about his neck. 

John Woolfolk threw himself back, when a wrist heavily struck hisshoulder and a jarring blow fell upon the wall. The hand, he knew, hadheld a knife, for he could feel it groping desperately over theplaster, and he put all his strength into an effort to drag hisassailant into the middle of the floor. 

It was impossible now to recover his pistol, but he would make itdifficult for Nicholas to get the knife. The struggle in that way wasequalized. He turned in the gripping arms about him and the men werechest to chest. Neither spoke; each fought solely to get the otherprostrate, while Nicholas developed a secondary pressure toward theblade buried in the wall. This Woolfolk successfully blocked. In thesupreme effort to bring the struggle to a decisive end neither dealtthe other minor injuries. There were no blows--nothing but thestraining pull of arms, the sudden weight of bodies, the cunningtwisting of legs. They fought swiftly, whirling and staggering fromplace to place. 

The hot breath of an invisible gaping mouth beat upon Woolfolk'scheek. He was an exceptionally powerful man. His spare body had beenhardened by its years of exposure to the elements, in the constantlabor he had expended on the ketch, the long contests with adversewinds and seas, and he had little doubt of his issuing successful fromthe present crisis. Iscah Nicholas, though his strength was beyondquestion, was heavy and slow. Yet he was struggling with surprisingagility. He was animated by a convulsive energy, a volcanic outburstcharacteristic of the obsession of monomania. 

The strife continued for an astonishing, an absurd, length of time. Woolfolk became infuriated at his inability to bring it to an end, andhe expended an even greater effort. Nicholas' arms were about hischest; he was endeavoring by sheer pressure to crush Woolfolk'sopposition, when the latter injected a mounting wrath into theconflict. They spun in the open like a grotesque human top, and fell. Woolfolk was momentarily underneath, but he twisted lithely uppermost. He felt a heavy, blunt hand leave his arm and feel, in the dark, forhis face. Its purpose was to spoil, and he caught it and savagely bentit down and back; but a cruel forcing of his leg defeated hispurpose. 

This, he realized, could not go on indefinitely; one or the otherwould soon weaken. An insidious doubt of his ultimate victory lodgedlike a burr in his brain. Nicholas' strength was inhuman; it increasedrather than waned. He was growing vindictive in a petty way--he toreat Woolfolk's throat, dug the flesh from his lower arm. Thereafterwarm and gummy blood made John Woolfolk's grip insecure. 

The doubt of his success grew; he fought more desperately. Histhoughts, which till now had been clear, logically aloof, were blurredin blind spurts of passion. His mentality gradually deserted him; hereverted to lower and lower types of the human animal; during theaccumulating seconds of the strife he swung back through countlesscenturies to the primitive, snarling brute. His shirt was torn from ashoulder, and he felt the sweating, bare skin of his opponent pressedagainst him. 

The conflict continued without diminishing. He struggled once more tohis feet, with Nicholas, and they exchanged battering blows, dealtnecessarily at random. Sometimes his arm swept violently through merespace, at others his fist landed with a satisfying shock on the bodyof his antagonist. The dark was occasionally crossed by flashes beforeWoolfolk's smitten eyes, but no actual light pierced the profoundnight of the upper hall. At times their struggle grew audible, smacking blows fell sharply; but there was no other sound except thatof the wind tearing at the sashes, thundering dully in the loose tinroof, rocking the dwelling. 

They fell again, and equally their efforts slackened, their gripsbecame more feeble. Finally, as if by common consent, they rolledapart. A leaden tide of apathy crept over Woolfolk's battered body, folded his aching brain. He listened in a sort of indifferentattention to the tempestuous breathing of Iscah Nicholas. JohnWoolfolk wondered dully where Millie was. There had been no sign ofher since he had fallen down the step and she had cried out. Perhapsshe was dead from fright. He considered this possibility in a hazy, detached manner. She would be better dead--if he failed. 

He heard, with little interest, a stirring on the floor beside him, and thought with an overwhelming weariness and distaste that thestrife was to commence once more. But, curiously, Nicholas moved awayfrom him. Woolfolk was glad; and then he was puzzled for a moment bythe sliding of hands over an invisible wall. He slowly realized thatthe other was groping for the knife he had buried in the plaster. JohnWoolfolk considered a similar search for the pistol he had dropped; hemight even light a match. It was a rather wonderful weapon and wouldspray lead like a hose of water. He would like exceedingly well tohave it in his hand with Nicholas before him. 

Then in a sudden mental illumination he realized the extreme peril ofthe moment; and, lurching to his feet, he again threw himself on theother. 

The struggle went on, apparently to infinity; it was less vigorousnow; the blows, for the most part, were impotent. Iscah Nicholas neversaid a word; and fantastic thoughts wheeled through Woolfolk's brain. He lost all sense of the identity of his opponent and became convincedthat he was combating an impersonal hulk--the thing that gasped andsmeared his face, that strove to end him, was the embodied and evilspirit of the place, a place that even Halvard had seen was damnablywrong. He questioned if such a force could be killed, if a beingmaterialized from the outer dark could be stopped by a pistol of eventhe latest, most ingenious mechanism. 

They fell and rose, and fell. Woolfolk's fingers were twisted in adamp lock of hair; they came away--with the hair. He moved to hisknees, and the other followed. For a moment they rested face to face, with arms limply clasped about the opposite shoulders. Then theyturned over on the floor; they turned once more, and suddenly thedarkness was empty beneath John Woolfolk. He fell down and down, beating his head on a series of sharp edges; while a second, heavybody fell with him, by turns under and above. 

XIII

He rose with the ludicrous alacrity of a man who had taken a publicand awkward misstep. The wan lamplight, diffused from within, madejust visible the bulk that had descended with him. It lay withoutmotion, sprawling upon a lower step and the floor. John Woolfolk movedbackward from it, his hand behind him, feeling for the entrance to thelighted room. He shifted his feet carefully, for the darkness waswheeling about him in visible black rings streaked with pale orange ashe passed into the room. 

Here objects, dimensions, became normally placed, recognizable. He sawthe mezzotint with its sere and sunny peace, the portfolios on theirstands, like grotesque and flattened quadrupeds, and Lichfield Stopeon the floor, still hiding his dead face in the crook of his arm. 

He saw these things, remembered them, and yet now they had newsignificance--they oozed a sort of vital horror, they seemed to crawlwith a malignant and repulsive life. The entire room was charged withthis palpable, sentient evil. John Woolfolk defiantly faced the still, cold inclosure; he was conscious of an unseen scrutiny, of a menacethat lived in pictures, moved the fingers of the dead, and that couldtake actual bulk and pound his heart sore. 

He was not afraid of the wrongness that inhabited this muck of houseand grove and matted bush. He said this loudly to the prostrate form;then, waiting a little, repeated it. He would smash the print with itsfallacious expanse of peace. The broken glass of the smitten picturejingled thinly on the floor. Woolfolk turned suddenly and defeated thepurpose of whatever had been stealthily behind him; anyway it haddisappeared. He stood in a strained attitude, listening to theaberrations of the wind without, when an actual presence slipped byhim, stopping in the middle of the floor. 

It was Millie Stope. Her eyes were opened to their widest extent, butthey had the peculiar blank fixity of the eyes of the blind. Abovethem her hair slipped and slid in a loosened knot. 

"I had to walk round him, " she protested in a low, fluctuating voice, "there was no other way.... Right by his head. My skirt----" She brokeoff and, shuddering, came close to John Woolfolk. "I think we'd bettergo away, " she told him, nodding. "It's quite impossible here, with himin the hall, where you have to pass so close. "

Woolfolk drew back from her. She too was a part of the house; she hadled him there--a white flame that he had followed into the swamp. Andthis was no ordinary marsh. It was, he added aloud, "A swamp ofsouls. "

"Then, " she replied, "we must leave at once. "

A dragging sound rose from the hall. Millie Stope cowered in avoiceless accession of terror; but John Woolfolk, lamp in hand, movedto the door. He was curious to see exactly what was happening. Thebulk had risen; a broad back swayed like a pendulum, and a swollenhand gripped the stair rail. The form heaved itself up a step, paused, tottering, and then mounted again. Woolfolk saw at once that the otherwas going for the knife buried in the wall above. He watched with animpersonal interest the dragging ascent. At the seventh step itceased; the figure crumpled, slid halfway back to the floor. 

"You can't do it, " Woolfolk observed critically. 

The other sat bowed, with one leg extended stiffly downward, onthe stair that mounted from the pale radiance of the lamp intoimpenetrable darkness. Woolfolk moved back into the room and replacedthe lamp on its table. Millie Stope still stood with open, hanginghands, a countenance of expectant dread. Her eyes did not shiftfrom the door as he entered and passed her; her gaze hung starkly onwhat might emerge from the hall. 

A deep loathing of his surroundings swept over John Woolfolk, a suddenrevulsion from the dead man on the floor, from the ponderous menace onthe stair, the white figure that had brought it all upon him. Amounting horror of the place possessed him, and he turned andincontinently fled. A complete panic enveloped him at his flight, ablind necessity to get away, and he ran heedlessly through the night, with head up and arms extended. His feet struck upon a rotten fragmentof board that broke beneath him, he pushed through a tangle of grass, and then his progress was held by soft and dragging sand. A momentlater he was halted by a chill flood rising abruptly to his knees. Hedrew back sharply and fell on the beach, with his heels in the waterof the bay. 

An insuperable weariness pinned him down, a complete exhaustion ofbrain and body. A heavy wind struck like a wet cloth on his face. Thesky had been swept clear of clouds, and stars sparkled in the puredepths of the night. They were white, with the exception of one thatburned with an unsteady yellow ray and seemed close by. This, JohnWoolfolk thought, was strange. He concentrated a frowning gaze uponit--perhaps in falling into the soiled atmosphere of the earth it hadlost its crystal gleam and burned with a turgid light. It was very, very probable. 

He continued to watch it, facing the tonic wind, until with a clearingof his mind, a gasp of joyful recognition, he knew that it was theriding light of the _Gar_. 

Woolfolk sat very still under the pressure of his renewed sanity. Factupon fact, memory on memory, returned, and in proper perspective builtup again his mentality, his logic, his scattered powers of being. The_Gar_ rode uneasily on her anchor chains; the wind was shifting. Theymust get away!--Halvard, waiting at the wharf--Millie----

He rose hurriedly to his feet--he had deserted Millie; left her, inall her anguish, with her dead parent and Iscah Nicholas. His love forher swept back, infinitely heightened by the knowledge of hersuffering. At the same time there returned the familiar fear of apermanent disarrangement in her of chords that were unresponsive tothe clumsy expedients of affection and science. She had been subjectedto a strain that might well unsettle a relatively strong will; and shehad been fragile in the beginning. 

She must be a part of no more scenes of violence, he told himself, moving hurriedly through the orange grove; she must be led quietly tothe tender--that is, if it were not already too late. His entireeffort to preserve her had been a series of blunders, each one ofwhich might well have proved fatal, and now, together, perhaps had. 

He mounted to the porch and entered the hall. The light flowedundisturbed from the room on the right; and, in its thin wash, he sawthat Iscah Nicholas had disappeared from the lower steps. Immediately, however, and from higher up, he heard a shuffling, and could just makeout a form heaving obscurely in the gloom. Nicholas patently wasmaking progress toward the consummation of his one fixed idea; butWoolfolk decided that at present he could best afford to ignore him. 

He entered the lighted room, and found Millie seated and gazing indull wonderment at the figure on the floor. 

"I must tell you about my father, " she said conversationally. "Youknow, in Virginia, the women tied an apron to his door because hewould not go to war, and for years that preyed on his mind, until hewas afraid of the slightest thing. He was without a particle ofstrength--just to watch the sun cross the sky wearied him, and thesmallest disagreement upset him for a week. "

She stopped, lost in amazement at what she contemplated, what was tofollow. 

"Then Nicholas----But that isn't important. I was to meet a man--wewere going away together, to some place where it would be peaceful. Wewere to sail there. He said at eight o'clock. Well, at seven Nicholaswas in the kitchen. I got father into his very heaviest coat, and laidout a muffler and his gloves, then sat and waited. I didn't needanything extra, my heart was quite warm. Then father asked why I hadchanged his coat--if I'd told him, he would have died of fright--hesaid he was too hot, and he fretted and worried. Nicholas heard him, and he wanted to know why I had put on father's winter coat. He foundthe muffler and gloves ready and got suspicious. 

"He stayed in the hall, crying a little--Nicholas cried rightoften--while I sat with father and tried to think of some excuse toget away. At last I had to go--for an orange, I said--but Nicholaswouldn't believe it. He pushed me back and told me I was going out tothe other. 

"'Nicholas, ' I said, 'don't be silly; nobody would come away from aboat on a night like this. Besides, he's gone away. ' We had that lastmade up. But he pushed me back again. Then I heard father move behindus, and I thought--he's going to die of fright right now. But father'sfootsteps came on across the floor and up to my side. "

"'Don't do that, Nicholas, ' he told him; 'take your hand from mydaughter. ' He swayed a little, his lips shook, but he stood facinghim. It was father!" Her voice died away, and she was silent for amoment, gazing at the vision of that unsuspected and surprisingcourage. "Of course Nicholas killed him, " she added. "He twisted himaway and father died. That didn't matter, " she told Woolfolk; "but theother was terribly important, anyone can see that. "

John Woolfolk listened intently, but there was no sound from without. Then, with every appearance of leisure, he rolled and lighted acigarette. 

"Splendid!" he said of her recital; "and I don't doubt you're rightabout the important thing. " He moved toward her, holding out his hand. "Splendid! But we must go on--the man is waiting for you. "

"It's too late, " she responded indifferently. She redirected herthoughts to her parent's enthralling end. "Do you think a man as braveas that should lie on the floor?" she demanded. "A flag, " she addedobscurely, considering an appropriate covering for the still form. 

"No, not on the floor, " Woolfolk instantly responded. He bent and, lifting the body of Lichfield Stope, carried it into the hall, where, relieved at the opportunity to dispose of his burden, he left it in anobscure corner. 

Iscah Nicholas was stirring again. John Woolfolk waited, gazing up thestair, but the other progressed no more than a step. Then he returnedto Millie. 

"Come, " he said. "No time to lose. " He took her arm and exerted agentle pressure toward the door. 

"I explained that it was too late, " she reiterated, evading him. "Father really lived, but I died. 'Swamp of souls, '" she added in alower voice. "Someone said that, and it's true; it happened to me. "

"The man waiting for you will be worried, " he suggested. "He dependsabsolutely on your coming. "

"Nice man. Something had happened to him too. He caught a rockfish andNicholas boiled it in milk for our breakfast. " At the mention of IscahNicholas a slight shiver passed over her. This was what Woolfolk hopedfor--a return of her normal revulsion from her surroundings, from thepast. 

"Nicholas, " he said sharply, contradicted by a faint dragging from thestair, "is dead. "

"If you could only assure me of that, " she replied wistfully. "If Icould be certain that he wasn't in the next shadow I'd go gladly. Anyother way it would be useless. " She laid her hand over her heart. "Imust get him out of here----My father did. His lips trembled a little, but he said quite clearly: 'Don't do that. Don't touch my daughter. '"

"Your father was a singularly brave man, " he assured her, rebellingagainst the leaden monotony of speech that had fallen upon them. "Yourmother too was brave, " he temporized. He could, he decided, wait nolonger. She must, if necessary, be carried away forcibly. It was adesperate chance--the least pressure might result in a permanent, jangling discord. Her waist, torn, he saw, upon her pallid shoulder, was an insufficient covering against the wind and night. Looking abouthe discovered the muffler, laid out for her father, crumpled on thefloor; and, with an arm about her, folded it over her throat andbreast. 

"Now we're away, " he declared in a forced lightness. She resisted himfor a moment, and then collapsed into his support. 

John Woolfolk half led, half carried her into the hall. His gazesearched the obscurity of the stair; it was empty; but from above camethe sound of a heavy, dragging step. 

XIV

Outside she cowered pitifully from the violent blast of the wind, theboundless, stirred space. They made their way about the corner of thehouse, leaving behind the pale, glimmering rectangle of the lightedwindow. In the thicket Woolfolk was forced to proceed more slowly. Millie stumbled weakly over the rough way, apparently at the point ofslipping to the ground. He felt a supreme relief when the cool sweepof the sea opened before him and Halvard emerged from the gloom. 

He halted for a moment, with his arm about Millie's shoulders, facinghis man. Even in the dark he was conscious of Poul Halvard's stalwartbeing, of his rocklike integrity. 

"I was delayed, " he said finally, amazed at the inadequacy of hiswords to express the pressure of the past hours. Had they been two orfour? He had been totally unconscious of the passage of actual time. In the dark house behind the orange grove he had lived throughtormented ages, descended into depths beyond the measured standard ofGreenwich. Halvard said:

"Yes, sir. "

The sound of a blundering progress rose from the path behind them, thebreaking of branches and the slipping of a heavy tread on thewater-soaked ground. John Woolfolk, with an oath, realized that it wasNicholas, still animated by his fixed, murderous idea. Millie Stoperecognized the sound, too, for she trembled violently on his arm. Heknew that she could support no more violence, and he turned to thedim, square-set figure before him. 

"Halvard, it's that fellow Nicholas. He's insane--has a knife. Willyou stop him while I get Miss Stope into the tender? She's pretty wellthrough. " He laid his hand on the other's shoulder as he startedimmediately forward. "I shall have to go on, Halvard, if anythingunfortunate occurs, " he said in a different voice. 

The sailor made no reply; but as Woolfolk urged Millie out over thewharf he saw Halvard throw himself upon a dark bulk that broke fromthe wood. 

The tender was made fast fore and aft; and, getting down into theuneasy boat, Woolfolk reached up and lifted Millie bodily to his side. She dropped in a still, white heap on the bottom. He unfastened thepainter and stood holding the tender close to the wharf, with his headabove its platform, straining his gaze in the direction of the obscurestruggle on land. 

He could see nothing, and heard only an occasional trampling of theunderbrush. It was difficult to remain detached, give no assistance, while Halvard encountered Iscah Nicholas. Yet with Millie in asemi-collapse, and the bare possibility of Nicholas' knifing themboth, he felt that this was his only course. Halvard was an unusuallypowerful, active man, and the other must have suffered from the stressof his long conflict in the hall. 

The thing terminated speedily. There was the sound of a heavyfall, a diminishing thrashing in the saw grass, and silence. Anindistinguishable form advanced over, the wharf, and Woolfolkprepared to shove the tender free. But it was Poul Halvard. He gotdown, Woolfolk thought, clumsily, and mechanically assumed his placeat the oars. Woolfolk sat aft, with an arm about Millie Stope. The sailor said fretfully:

"I stopped him. He was all pumped out. Missed his hand at first--thedark--a scratch. "

He rested on the oars, fingering his shoulder. The tender swungdangerously near the corrugated rock of the shore, and Woolfolksharply directed: "Keep way on her. "

"Yes, sir, " Halvard replied, once more swinging into his short, efficient stroke. It was, however, less sure than usual; an oar missedits hold and skittered impotently over the water, drenching Woolfolkwith a brief, cold spray. Again the bow of the tender dipped into thepoint of land they were rounding, and John Woolfolk spoke moreabruptly than before. 

He was seriously alarmed about Millie. Her face was apathetic, almostblank, and her arms hung across his knees with no more response than adoll's. He wondered desperately if, as she had said, her spirit haddied; if the Millie Stope that had moved him so swiftly and tragicallyfrom his long indifference, his aversion to life, had gone, leavinghim more hoplessly alone than before. The sudden extinction of Ellen'slife had been more supportable than Millie's crouching dumbly at hisfeet. His arm unconsciously tightened about her, and she gazed up witha momentary, questioning flicker of her wide-opened eyes. He repeatedher name in a deep whisper, but her head fell forward loosely, andleft him in racking doubt. 

Now he could see the shortly swaying riding light of the _Gar_. Halvard was propelling them vigorously but erratically forward. Attimes he remuttered his declarations about the encounter withNicholas. The stray words reached Woolfolk:

"Stopped him--the cursed dark--a scratch. "

He brought the tender awkwardly alongside the ketch, with a grindingshock, and held the boats together while John Woolfolk shifted Millieto the deck. Woolfolk took her immediately into the cabin; where, lighting a swinging lamp, he placed her on one of the prepared berthsand endeavored to wrap her in a blanket. But, in a shuddering accessof fear, she rose with outheld palms. 

"Nicholas!" she cried shrilly. "There--at the door!"

He sat beside her, restraining her convulsive effort to cower in afar, dark angle of the cabin. 

"Nonsense!" he told her brusquely. "You are on the _Gar_. You aresafe. In an hour you will be in a new world. "

"With John Woolfolk?"

"I am John Woolfolk. "

"But he--you--left me. "

"I am here, " he insisted with a tightening of his heart. He rose, animated by an overwhelming necessity to get the ketch under way, toleave at once, for ever, the invisible shore of the bay. He gentlyfolded her again in the blanket, but she resisted him. "I'd ratherstay up, " she said with a sudden lucidity. "It's nice here; I wantedto come before, but he wouldn't let me. "

A glimmer of hope swept over him as he mounted swiftly to the deck. "Get up the anchors, " he called; "reef down the jigger and put on ahandful of jib. "

There was no immediate response, and he peered over the obscured deckin search of Halvard. The man rose slowly from a sitting posture bythe main boom. "Very good, sir, " he replied in a forced tone. 

He disappeared forward, while Woolfolk, shutting the cabin door on theconfusing illumination within, lighted the binnacle lamp, bent overthe engine, swiftly making connections and adjustments, and crankedthe wheel with a sharp, expert turn. The explosions settled into adull, regular succession, and he coupled the propeller and slowlymaneuvered the ketch up over the anchors, reducing the strain on thehawsers and allowing Halvard to get in the slack. He waitedimpatiently for the sailor's cry of all clear, and demanded the causeof the delay. 

"The bight slipped, " the other called in a muffled, angry voice. "One's clear now, " he added. "Bring her up again. " The ketch forgedahead, but the wait was longer than before. "Caught, " Halvard's voicedrifted thinly aft; "coral ledge. " Woolfolk held the _Gar_ stationaryuntil the sailor cried weakly: "Anchor's apeak. "

They moved inperceptibly through the dark, into the greater force ofthe wind beyond the point. The dull roar of the breaking surf aheadgrew louder. Halvard should have had the jib up and been aft at thejigger, but he failed to appear. John Woolfolk wondered, in a mountingimpatience, what was the matter with the man. Finally an obscure formpassed him and hung over the housed sail, stripping its cover andremoving the stops. The sudden thought of a disconcerting possibilitybanished Woolfolk's annoyance. "Halvard, " he demanded, "did Nicholasknife you?"

"A scratch, " the other stubbornly reiterated. "I'll tie it up later. No time now--I stopped him permanent. "

The jigger, reefed to a mere irregular patch, rose with a jerk, andthe ketch rapidly left the protection of the shore. She dipped sharplyand, flattened over by a violent ball of wind, buried her rail in theblack, swinging water, and there was a small crash of breaking chinafrom within. The wind appeared to sweep high up in empty space andoccasionally descend to deal the yacht a staggering blow. The bar, directly ahead--as Halvard had earlier pointed out--was now coveredwith the smother of a lowering tide. The pass, the other haddiscovered, too, had filled. It was charted at four feet, the _Gar_drew a full three, and Woolfolk knew that there must be no error, nouncertainty, in running out. 

Halvard was so long in stowing away the jigger shears that Woolfolkturned to make sure that the sailor had not been swept from the deck. The "scratch, " he was certain, was deeper than the other admitted. When they were safely at sea he would insist upon an examination. 

The subject of this consideration fell rather than stepped into thecockpit, and stood rocked by the motion of the swells, clinging to thecabin's edge. Woolfolk shifted the engine to its highest speed, andthey were driving through the tempestuous dark on to the bar. He wasnow confronted by the necessity for an immediate decision. Halvard orhimself would have to stand forward, clinging precariously to a stay, and repeatedly sound the depth of the shallowing water as they felttheir way out to sea. He gazed anxiously at the dark bulk before him, and saw that the sailor had lost his staunchness of outline, hisaspect of invincible determination. 

"Halvard, " he demanded again sharply, "this is no time for pretense. How are you?"

"All right, " the other repeated desperately, through clenched teeth. "I've--I've taken knives from men before--on the docks at Stockholm. Imissed his hand at first--it was the night. "

The cabin door swung open, and a sudden lurch flung Millie Stopeagainst the wheel. Woolfolk caught and held her until the wave rolledby. She was stark with terror, and held abjectly to the rail while thenext swell lifted them upward. He attempted to urge her back to theprotection of the cabin, but she resisted with such a convulsivedetermination that he relinquished the effort and enveloped her in hisglistening oilskin. 

This had consumed a perilous amount of time; and, swiftly decisive, hecommanded Halvard to take the wheel. He swung himself to the deck andsecured the long sounding pole. He could see ahead on either side thedim white bars forming and dissolving, and called to the man at thewheel:

"Mark the breakers! Fetch her between. "

On the bow, leaning out over the surging tide, he drove the soundingpole forward and down, but it floated back free. They were not yet onthe bar. The ketch heeled until the black plain of water rose abovehis knees, driving at him with a deceitful force, sinking back slowlyas the yacht straightened buoyantly. He again sounded; the pole struckbottom, and he cried:

"Five. "

The infuriated beating of the waves on the obstruction drawn acrosstheir path drowned his voice, and he shouted the mark once more. Thenafter another sounding:

"Four and three. "

The yacht fell away dangerously before a heavy diagonal blow; she hungfor a moment, rolling like a log, and then slowly regained her way. Woolfolk's apprehension increased. It would, perhaps, have been betterif they had delayed, to examine Halvard's injury. The man had insistedthat it was of no moment, and John Woolfolk had been driven by aconsuming desire to leave the miasmatic shore. He swung the poleforward and cried:

"Four and a half. "

The water was shoaling rapidly. The breaking waves on the port andstarboard swept by with lightning rapidity. The ketch veered again, shipped a crushing weight of water, and responded more slowly thanbefore to a tardy pressure of the rudder. The greatest peril, JohnWoolfolk knew, lay directly before them. He realized from the actionof the ketch that Halvard was steering uncertainly, and that at anymoment the _Gar_ might strike and fall off too far for recovery, whenshe could not live in the pounding surf. 

"Four and one, " he cried hoarsely. And then immediately after:"Four. "

Chance had been against him from the first, he thought, and thereflashed through his mind the dark panorama, the accumulating disastersof the night. A negation lay upon his existence that would not belifted. It had followed him like a sinister shadow for years to thisobscure, black smother of water, to the _Gar_ reeling crazily forwardunder an impotent hand. The yacht was behaving heroically; no otherketch could have lived so long, responded so gallantly to a waveringwheel. 

"Three and three, " he shouted above the combined stridor of wind andsea. 

The next minute would see their safe passage or a helpless hulkbeating to pieces on the bar, with three human fragments whirlingunder the crushing masses of water, floating, perhaps, with the dawninto the tranquillity of the bay. 

"Three and a half, " he cried monotonously. 

The _Gar_ trembled like a wounded and dull animal. The solid seas werereaching hungrily over Woolfolk's legs. A sudden stolidity possessedhim. He thrust the pole out deliberately, skillfully:

"Three and a quarter. "

A lower sounding would mean the end. He paused for a moment, hisdripping face turned to the far stars; his lips moved in silent, unformulated aspirations--Halvard and himself, in the sea that hadbeen their home; but Millie was so fragile! He made the soundingprecisely, between the heaving swells, and marked the pole instantlydriven backward by their swinging flight. 

"Three and a half. " His voice held a new, uncontrollable quiver. Hesounded again immediately: "And three-quarters. "

They had passed the bar. 

XV

A gladness like the white flare of burning powder swept over him, andthen he became conscious of other, minor sensations--his head achedintolerably from the fall down the stair, and a grinding pain shotthrough his shoulder, lodging in his torn lower arm at the slightestmovement. He slipped the sounding pole into its loops on the cabin andhastily made his way aft to the relief of Poul Halvard. 

The sailor was nowhere visible; but, in an intermittent, reddish lightthat faded and swelled as the cabin door swung open and shut, Woolfolksaw a white figure clinging to the wheel--Millie. 

Instantly his hands replaced hers on the spokes and, as if with apalpable sigh of relief, the _Gar_ steadied to her course. MillieStope clung to the deck rail, sobbing with exhaustion. 

"He's--he's dead!" she exclaimed, between her racking inspirations. She pointed to the floor of the cockpit, and there, slidinggrotesquely with the motion of the seaway, was Poul Halvard. An armwas flung out, as if in ward against the ketch's side, but itcrumpled, the body hit heavily, a hand seemed to clutch at the boardsit had so often and thoroughly swabbed; but without avail. The facemomentarily turned upward; it was haggard beyond expression, and borestamped upon it, in lines that resembled those of old age, theagonized struggle against the inevitable last treachery of life. 

"When----" John Woolfolk stopped in sheer, leaden amazement. 

"Just when you called 'Three and a quarter. ' Before that he had fallenon his knees. He begged me to help him hold the wheel. He said you'dbe lost if I didn't. He talked all the time about keeping her head upand up. I helped him. Your voice came back years apart. At the last hewas on the floor, holding the bottom of the wheel. He told me to keepit steady, dead ahead. His voice grew so weak that I couldn't hear;and then all at once he slipped away. I--I held on--called to you. Butagainst the wind----"

He braced his knee against the wheel and, leaning out, found thejigger sheet and flattened the reefed sail; he turned to where the jibsheet led after, and then swung the ketch about. The yacht rodesmoothly, slipping forward over the long, even ground swell, and heturned with immeasurable emotion to the woman beside him. 

The light from the cabin flooded out over her face, and he saw that, miraculously, the fear had gone. Her countenance was drawn withweariness and the hideous strain of the past minutes, but her gazesquarely met the night and sea. Her chin was lifted, its graceful linefirm, and her mouth was in repose. She had, as he had recognized shealone must, conquered the legacy of Lichfield Stope; while he, JohnWoolfolk, and Halvard, had put Nicholas out of her life. She wasfree. 

"If you could go below----" he suggested. "In the morning, with thiswind, we'll be at anchor under a fringe of palms, in water like a bluesilk counterpane. "

"I think I could now, with you, " she replied. She pressed her lips, salt and enthralling, against his face, and made her way into thecabin. He locked the wheel momentarily and, following, wrapped her inthe blankets, on the new sheets prepared for her coming. Then, puttingout the light, he shut the cabin door and returned to the wheel. 

The body of Poul Halvard struck his feet and rested there. A good man, born by the sea, who had known its every expression; with a faithfuland simple heart, as such men occasionally had. 

The diminished wind swept in a clear diapason through the pellucidsky; the resplendent sea reached vast and magnetic to its invisiblehorizon. A sudden distaste seized John Woolfolk for the dragging deathceremonials of land. Halvard had known the shore mostly as a turbulentand unclean strip that had finally brought about his end. 

He leaned forward and found beyond any last doubt that the other wasdead; a black, clotted surface adhered to the wound which his pride, his invincible determination, had driven him to deny. 

In the space beneath the afterdeck Woolfolk found a spare foldedanchor for the tender, a length of rope; and he slowly completed thepreparations for his purpose. He lifted the body to the narrow deckoutside the rail, and, in a long dip, the waves carried it smoothlyand soundlessly away. John Woolfolk said:

"'... Commit his body to the deep, looking for the general resurrection... Through ... Christ. '"

Then, upright and motionless at the wheel, with the wan radiance ofthe binnacle lamp floating up over his hollow cheeks and set gaze, heheld the ketch southward through the night.