on wrists like twisted copper wires from circular
cuffs fastened with large mosaic buttons.

"We are alone here," he proceeded in a fluctuating voice, the voice of
a shadow; "the man is away. My daughter--I----" He grew inaudible,
although his lips maintained a faint movement.

The fear that lurked illusively in the daughter was in the parent
magnified to an appalling panic, an instinctive, acute agony that had
crushed everything but a thin, tormented spark of life. He passed his
hand over a brow as dry as the spongy limbs of the cypress, brushing a
scant lock like dead, bleached moss.

"The fish," he pronounced; "yes ... acceptable."

"If you will carry it back for me," Millie Stope requested; "we have
no ice; I must put it in water." He followed her about a bay window
with ornamental fretting that bore the shreds of old, variegated
paint. He could see, amid an incongruous wreckage within, a dismantled
billiard table, its torn cloth faintly green beneath a film of dust.
They turned and arrived at the kitchen door. "There, please." She
indicated a bench on the outside wall, and he deposited his burden.

"You have been very nice," she told him, making her phrase less
commonplace by a glance of her wide, appealing eyes. "Now, I suppose,
you will go on across the world?"

"Not tonight," he replied distantly.

"Perhaps, then, you will come ashore again. We see so few people. My
father would be benefited. It was only at first, so suddenly--he was
startled."

"There is a great deal to do on the ketch," he replied indirectly,
maintaining his retreat from the slightest advance of life. "I came
ashore to discover if you had a large water supply and if I might fill
my casks."

"Rain water," she informed him; "the cistern is full."

"Then I'll send Halvard to you." He withdrew a step, but paused at the
incivility of his leaving.

A sudden weariness had settled over the shoulders of Millie Stope; she
appeared young and very white. Woolfolk was acutely conscious of her
utter isolation with the shivering figure on the porch, the
unmaterialized Nicholas. She had delicate hands.

"Good-by," he said, bowing formally. "And thank you for the fishing."

He whistled sharply for the tender.

IV

Throughout the afternoon, with a triangular scraping iron, he assisted
Halvard in removing the whitened varnish from the yacht's mahogany.
They worked silently, with only the shrill note of the edges drawing
across the woo