nce could read like print; if the simple-minded
clam-digger had not quite unintentionally ripped away the mask which he
had, until now, worn with a reasonable success.

But Conscience had missed the moment of self-betrayal because an
identical anxiety had for the instant blinded her intuition.

"Wa'al," continued Ira complacently, "I ain't never lost a leg nor yet
an arm--but, in a manner of speakin', I cal'late I know just round about
what it's like. A feller's life ain't never the same ag'in. That man
that's handlin' that boat now--he wasn't worth much to hisself nor
nobody else a'fore he went a-gunnin', that time."

He paused, wondering vaguely why his simple recital had brought a
constrained silence, where there had been laughter and voluble
conversation, then feeling that the burden of talk lay with him, he
resorted to repetition.

"The reason I spoke the way I did just now was I wondered if either one
of you ever had anything like that happen to you. Not that I presumed
you'd ever lost a limb--but there's lots of other things folks can lose
that hurts as much; things that can be hauled out by the roots, like;
things that don't never leave people quite the same afterwards."

Stuart smiled, though with a taint of ruefulness.

"I guess, Ira," he agreed, "almost everybody has lost something."

Ira stood nodding like a China mandarin, then suddenly he came out of
his preoccupation to announce:

"I'll begin fetchin' all this plunder back to the boat now. I cal'late
to catch the tide in about half an hour. You folks had better forelay to
come aboard by then."

Conscience and Stuart strolled along the stretch of beach until, around
a jutting elbow of sand dunes, the woman halted by a blackened fragment
of a ship's skeleton. She sat for a while looking out with a reminiscent
amusement in her eyes--and something more cryptic.

The man turned his gaze inward to the green of the beach-grass beyond
the sand where he could make out a bit of twisting road. There was
something tantalizingly familiar about that scrap of landscape;
something which stirred yet eluded a memory linked with powerful
associations.

Then abruptly it all came back.

His car had been standing just at that visible stretch of road on the
afternoon when Conscience had begged him not to criticize her father and
he had retorted bitterly. He could see again the way in which she had
flinched and hear again the voice in which she had replied, "You kn