man clambered upon it,
threw a couple of half-hitches in the painter round one of the stakes,
shouldered the oars and began to shamble toward the hotel: a tall,
ungainly figure blackly silhouetted against the steel-blue sky of
evening.

Eleanor waited where she was, near the beginning of the plank walk, to
get a better look at him. In time he passed her, with a shy nod and
sidelong glance. He seemed to be well past middle-age, of no pretensions
whatever to physical loveliness and (she would have said) incurably lazy
and stupid: his face dull and heavy, his whole carriage eloquent of a
nature of sluggish shiftlessness.

He disappeared round the house, and a moment later she heard Mrs. Clover
haranguing him in a shrill voice of impatience little resembling the
tone she had employed with the girl.

For an instant Eleanor dreamed wildly of running down to the dock,
throwing herself into the rowboat and casting it off to drift whither it
would. But the folly of this was too readily apparent; even if she might
be sure that the tide would carry her away from the island, the water
was so shallow that a man could wade out to the motor-boat, climb into
it and run her down with discouraging ease. As for the motor-boat--she
hadn't the least idea of the art of running a motor; and besides, she
would be overhauled before she could get to it; for she made no doubt
whatever that she was being very closely watched, and would be until the
men had left the island. After that ... a vista of days of grinding
loneliness and hopeless despair opened out before her disheartened
mental vision.

She resumed her aimless tour of inspection, little caring whither she
wandered so long as it was far from the house, as far as possible
from ... _him_.

Sensibly the desolate spirit of the spot saturated her mood. No case
that she had ever heard of seemed to her so desperate as that of the
lonely, helpless girl marooned upon this wave-bound patch of earth and
sand, cut off from all means of communication with her kind, her destiny
at the disposal of the maleficent wretch who called himself her father,
her sole companions two alleged criminals whose depravity, if what she
had heard were true, was subordinate only to his.

She could have wept, but wouldn't; the emotion that oppressed her was
not one that tears would soothe, her plight not one that tears could
mend.

Her sole comfort resided in the fact that she was apparently to be let
alone, free