her voice and
eyes. Yet, in the moment that she had been made explicable, he
recalled the conviction that the knowledge of an actual menace lurked
in her mind; he had seen it in the tension of her body, in the anxiety
of fleet backward glances.

The latter, he told himself, might be merely a symptom of mental
sickness, a condition natural to the influences under which she had
been formed. He tested and rejected that possibility--there could be
no doubt of her absolute sanity. It was patent in a hundred details of
her carriage, in her mentality as it had been revealed in her
restrained, balanced narrative.

There was, too, the element of her mother to be considered. Millie
Stope had known very little about her, principally the self-evident
fact of the latter's "brave heart." It would have needed that to
remain steadfast through the racking recitals of the long, waking
darks; to accompany to this desolate and lonely refuge the man who had
had an apron tied to his doorknob. In the degree that the daughter had
been a prey to the man's fear she would have benefited from the
stiffer qualities of the English governess. Life once more assumed its
enigmatic mask.

His companion said:

"All that--and I haven't said a word about myself, the real end of my
soliloquy. I'm permanently discouraged; I have qualms about boring
you. No, I shall never find another listener as satisfactory as the
iron dog."

A light glimmered far at sea. "I sit here a great deal," she informed
him, "and watch the ships, a thumbprint of blue smoke at day and a
spark at night, going up and down their water roads. You are
enviable--getting up your anchor, sailing where you like, safe and
free." Her voice took on a passionate intensity that surprised him; it
was sick with weariness and longing, with sudden revolt from the
pervasive apprehension.

"Safe and free," he repeated thinly, as if satirizing the condition
implied by those commonplace, assuaging words. He had, in his flight
from society, sought simply peace. John Woolfolk now questioned all
his implied success. He had found the elemental hush of the sea, the
iron aloofness of rocky and uninhabited coasts, but he had never been
able to still the dull rebellion within, the legacy of the past. A
feeling of complete failure settled over him. His safety and freedom
amounted to this--that life had broken him and cast him aside.

A long, hollow wail rose from the land, and Millie Stope moved
sharpl