broken your training rules."

"How do you mean?"

"By talking about it."

Joan clapped her hands in approval. Tudor lighted a fresh cigarette,
while Sheldon sat on, imperturbably silent.

"He got you there," Joan challenged. "Why don't you crush him?"

"Really, I can't think of anything to say," Sheldon said. "I know my
position is sound, and that is satisfactory enough."

"You might retort," she suggested, "that when an adult is with
kindergarten children he must descend to kindergarten idioms in order to
make himself intelligible. That was why you broke training rules. It
was the only way to make us children understand."

"You've deserted in the heat of the battle, Miss Lackland, and gone over
to the enemy," Tudor said plaintively.

But she was not listening. Instead, she was looking intently across the
compound and out to sea. They followed her gaze, and saw a green light
and the loom of a vessel's sails.

"I wonder if it's the _Martha_ come back," Tudor hazarded.

"No, the sidelight is too low," Joan answered. "Besides, they've got the
sweeps out. Don't you hear them? They wouldn't be sweeping a big vessel
like the _Martha_."

"Besides, the _Martha_ has a gasoline engine--twenty-five horse-power,"
Tudor added.

"Just the sort of a craft for us," Joan said wistfully to Sheldon. "I
really must see if I can't get a schooner with an engine. I might get a
second-hand engine put in."

"That would mean the additional expense of an engineer's wages," he
objected.

"But it would pay for itself by quicker passages," she argued; "and it
would be as good as insurance. I know. I've knocked about amongst reefs
myself. Besides, if you weren't so mediaeval, I could be skipper and
save more than the engineer's wages."

He did not reply to her thrust, and she glanced at him. He was looking
out over the water, and in the lantern light she noted the lines of his
face--strong, stern, dogged, the mouth almost chaste but firmer and
thinner-lipped than Tudor's. For the first time she realized the quality
of his strength, the calm and quiet of it, its simple integrity and
reposeful determination. She glanced quickly at Tudor on the other side
of her. It was a handsomer face, one that was more immediately pleasing.
But she did not like the mouth. It was made for kissing, and she
abhorred kisses. This was not a deliberately achieved concept; it came
to her in the form of a faint and vaguely intangible