d, while the westering sun plunged its diagonal rays far
into the transparent depths of the bay. The _Gar_ floated motionless
on water like a pale evening over purple and silver flowers threaded
by fish painted the vermilion and green of parrakeets. Inshore the
pallid cypresses seemed, as John Woolfolk watched them, to twist in
febrile pain. With the waning of day the land took on its air of
unhealthy mystery; the mingled, heavy scents floated out in a sickly
tide; the ruined facade glimmered in the half light.

Woolfolk's thoughts turned back to the woman living in the miasma of
perfume and secret fear. He heard again her wistful voice pronounce
the names of far places, of Tarragona and Seriphos, investing them
with the accent of an intense hopeless desire. He thought of the
inexplicable place of her birth and of the riven, unsubstantial figure
of the man with the blood pulsing into his ocherous face. Some old,
profound error or calamity had laid its blight upon him, he was
certain; but the most lamentable inheritance was not sufficient to
account for the acute apprehension in his daughter's tones. This was
different in kind from the spiritual collapse of the aging man. It was
actual, he realized that; proceeding--in part at least--from without.

He wondered, scraping with difficulty the under-turning of a cathead,
if whatever dark tide was centered above her would, perhaps, descend
through the oleander-scented night and stifle her in the stagnant
dwelling. He had a swift, vividly complete vision of the old man face
down upon the floor in a flickering, reddish light.

He smiled in self-contempt at this neurotic fancy; and, straightening
his cramped muscles, rolled a cigarette. It might be that the years he
had spent virtually alone on the silence of various waters had
affected his brain. Halvard's broad, concentrated countenance, the
steady, grave gaze and determined mouth, cleared Woolfolk's mind of
its phantoms. He moved to the cockpit and from there said:

"That will do for today."

Halvard followed, and commenced once more the familiar, ordered
preparations for supper. John Woolfolk, smoking while the sky turned
to malachite, became sharply aware of the unthinkable monotony of the
universal course, of the centuries wheeling in dull succession into
infinity. Life seemed to him no more varied than the wire drum in
which squirrels raced nowhere. His own lot, he told himself grimly,
was no worse than another. Exis