sweetness irrigated his
arid tissues, until every blessed drop was drained. Then, and not till
then, he lowered the pail and with sane vision began to renew
acquaintance with the world.

He was sitting a trifle out of the shallow imprint of his body in the
sands, in the lee of the beached cat-boat he now recalled as one might
the features of an incubus. The woman he had rescued sat quite near him.
The gale was still booming overhead, but now with less force (or so he
fancied); and the surf still crashed in thunders on the beach a hundred
feet or more away; but the haze was lighter, and the blue of the sky was
visible, if tarnished.

Looking straight ahead from where he sat, the sands curved off in a wide
crescent, ending in a long, sandy spit. Beyond this lay a broad expanse
of maddened water, blue and white, backed by the empurpled loom of a
lofty headland, dim in the smoky distance.

On his right lay the green landscape, reminiscent even as the boat was
reminiscent in whose shadow he found himself: both fragments of the
fugitive impressions gathered in that nightmare time of landing. There
was a low, ragged earth-bank rising from the sands to a clutter of
ramshackle, unpainted, hideous wooden buildings--some hardly more than
sheds; back of these and stretching away on either hand, a spreading
vista of treeless uplands, gently undulant and richly carpeted with
grass and under-growth in a melting scheme of tender browns and greens
and yellows, with here and there a trace of dusky red. Midway between
the beach and where the hazy uplands lifted their blurred profile
against the faded sky, set some distance apart from the community of
dilapidated structures, stood a commonplace farm-house, in good repair,
strongly constructed and neatly painted; with a brood of out buildings.
Low stone fences lined the uplands with wandering streaks of gray. Here
and there, in scattered groups and singly, sheep foraged. But they were
lonely evidences of life. No human being was visible in any quarter.

With puzzled eyes Whitaker sought counsel and enlightenment of the
woman, and found in her appearance quite as much to confound
anticipation and deepen perplexity. She was hardly to be identified with
the delightfully normal, essentially well-groomed creature he
remembered. What she had worn when setting forth to call on him,
accompanied by her maid, the night before, he could not say; but it
certainly could have had nothing in common wi