. Billy took to haunting
the reefs at dusk.

Again and again, the same thing happened.

Suddenly--and it was as if successive waves of electricity charged
through his body--the quiet air began to purr and vibrate and drum. Out
of the star-shot dusk emerged the speeding whiteness of Julia. Always,
as she approached, she slowed her flight. Always as she passed, her
sorrowing gray eyes would seek his burning blue ones. Billy could bring
himself to speak of this strange experience to nobody, not even to
Honey. For there was in it something untellable, unsharable, the wonder
of the vision and the dream, the unreality of the apparition.

The excitement of these happenings kept the men entertained, but it also
kept them keyed up to high tension. For a while they did not notice
this themselves. But when they attempted to go back to their interrupted
work, they found it hard to concentrate upon it. Frank Merrill had
given up trying to make them patrol the beach. Unaided, day and night he
attended to their signals.

"Well," said Honey Smith one day and, for the first time, there was a
peevish note in his voice, "that 'natural selection' theory of yours,
Ralph, seems to have worked out to some extent--but not enough. We seem
to be comfortably divided, all ten of us, into happy couples, but hanged
if I'm strong for this long-distance acquaintance."

"You're right there," Ralph Addington admitted; "we don't seem to be
getting any forwarder."

"It's all very pretty and romantic to have these girls flying about,"
Honey continued in a grumbling tone, "but it's too much like flirting
with a canary-bird. Damn it all, I want to talk with them."

Ralph made a hopeless gesture. "It is a deadlock, I admit. I'm at my
wits' end."

Perhaps Honey expressed what the others felt. At any rate, a sudden
irascibility broke out among them. They were good-natured enough while
the girls were about, but over their work and during their leisure, they
developed what Honey described as every kind of blue-bean, sourball,
katzenjammer and grouch. They fought heroically against it--and their
method of fighting took various forms, according to the nature of the
four men. Frank Merrill lost himself in his books. Pete Murphy began the
score of an opera vaguely heroic in theme; he wrote every spare moment.
Billy Fairfax worked so hard that he grew thin. Honey Smith went off on
long, solitary walks. Ralph Addington, as usual, showed an exasperating
tenden