is imagination
flung before him kinetoscopic flashes of what his father's life had been
and Horace Gower's. That vision appalled MacRae. He would not let it
happen,--not to him and Betty.

He washed, ate his supper, lay on his bunk in the pilot house and smoked
a cigarette. Then he went out on deck. The moon crept up in a cloudless
sky, dimming the stars. There was no wind about the island. But there
was wind loose somewhere on the Gulf. The glass was falling. The swells
broke more heavily along the cliffs. At the mouth of the Cove white
sheets of spray lifted as each comber reared and broke in that narrow
place.

He recollected that he had left the _Blanco's_ dinghy hauled up on the
beach on the tip of Point Old. He got ashore now in the green dugout and
walked across to the Point.

A man is seldom wholly single-track in his ideas, his impulses. MacRae
thought of the dinghy. He had a care for its possible destruction by the
rising sea. But he thought also of Betty. There was a pleasure in simply
looking at the house in which she lived. Lights glowed in the windows.
The cottage glistened in the moonlight.

When he came out on the tip of the Point the dinghy, he saw, lay safe
where he had dragged it up on the rocks. And when he had satisfied
himself of this he stood with hands thrust deep in his pockets, looking
down on Poor Man's Rock, watching the swirl and foam as each swell ran
over its sunken head.

MacRae had a subconscious perception of beauty, beauty of form and
color. It moved him without his knowing why. He was in a mood to respond
to beauty this night. He had that buoyant, grateful feeling which comes
to a man when he has escaped some great disaster, when he is suddenly
freed from some grim apprehension of the soul.

The night was one of wonderful beauty. The moon laid its silver path
across the sea. The oily swells came up that moon-path in undulating
folds to break in silver fragments along the shore. The great island
beyond the piercing shaft of the Ballenas light and the mainland far to
his left lifted rugged mountains sharp against the sky. From the
southeast little fluffs of cloud, little cottony flecks white as virgin
snow, sailed before the wind that mothered the swells. But there was no
wind on Squitty yet. There was breathless stillness except for the low,
spaced mutter of the surf.

He stood a long time, drinking in the beauty of it all,--the sea and
the moon-path, and the hushed, dark wood