tence was all of the same drab piece.
It had seemed gay enough when he was young, worked with gold and
crimson threads, and then----

His thoughts were broken by Halyard's appearance in the companionway,
and he descended to his solitary supper in the contracted, still
cabin.

Again on deck his sense of the monotony of life trebled. He had been
cruising now about the edges of continents for twelve years. For
twelve years he had taken no part in the existence of the cities he
had passed, as often as possible without stopping, and of the villages
gathered invitingly under their canopies of trees. He was--yes, he
must be--forty-six. Life was passing away; well, let it ...
worthless.

The growing radiance of the moon glimmered across the water and folded
the land in a gossamer veil. The same uneasiness, the inchoate desire
to go ashore that had seized upon him the night before, reasserted its
influence. The face of Millie Stope floated about him like a magical
gardenia in the night of the matted trees. He resisted the pressure
longer than before; but in the end he was seated in the tender,
pulling toward the beach.

He entered the orange grove and slowly approached the house beyond.
Millie Stope advanced with a quick welcome.

"I'm glad," she said simply. "Nicholas is back. The fish weighed--"

"I think I'd better not know," he interrupted. "I might be tempted to
mention it in the future, when it would take on the historic suspicion
of the fish story."

"But it was imposing," she protested. "Let's go to the sea; it's so
limitless in the moonlight."

He followed her over the path to where the remains of the wharf
projected into a sea as black, and as solid apparently, as ebony, and
across which the moon flung a narrow way like a chalk mark. Millie
Stope seated herself on the boarding and he found a place near by. She
leaned forward, with her arms propped up and her chin couched on her
palms. Her potency increased rather than diminished with association;
her skin had a rare texture; her movements, the turn of the wrists,
were distinguished. He wondered again at the strangeness of her
situation.

She looked about suddenly and surprised his palpable questioning.

"You are puzzled," she pronounced. "Perhaps you are setting me in the
middle of romance. Please don't! Nothing you might guess----" She
broke off abruptly, returned to her former pose. "And yet," she added
presently, "I have a perverse desire to talk about