mmerce and communication had gone by water, was one
of the innumerable victims of progress and of the concentration of
effort into huge impersonalities. He thought he could trace other even
more complete ruins, but his interest waned. He laid the glasses back
upon the deck. The choked bubble of boiling water sounded from the
cabin, mingled with the irregular sputter of cooking fat and the
clinking of plates and silver as Halvard set the table. Without, the
light was fading swiftly; the wavering cry of an owl quivered from the
cypress across the water, and the western sky changed from paler
yellow to green. Woolfolk moved abruptly, and, securing a bucket to
the handle of which a short rope had been spliced and finished with an
ornamental Turk's-head, he swung it overboard and brought it up half
full. In the darkness of the bucket the water shone with a faint
phosphorescence. Then from a basin he lathered his hands with a thick,
pinkish paste, washed his face, and started toward the cabin.

He was already in the companionway when, glancing across the still
surface of the bay, he saw a swirl moving into view about a small
point. He thought at first that it was a fish, but the next moment saw
the white, graceful silhouette of an arm. It was a woman swimming.
John Woolfolk could now plainly make out the free, solid mass of her
hair, the naked, smoothly turning shoulder. She was swimming with
deliberate ease, with a long, single overarm stroke; and it was
evident that she had not seen the ketch. Woolfolk stood, his gaze
level with the cabin top, watching her assured progress. She turned
again, moving out from the shore, then suddenly stopped. Now, he
realized, she saw him.

The swimmer hung motionless for a breath; then, with a strong, sinuous
drive, she whirled about and made swiftly for the point of land. She
was visible for a short space, low in the water, her hair wavering in
the clear flood, and then disappeared abruptly behind the point,
leaving behind--a last vanishing trace of her silent passage--a
smooth, subsiding wake on the surface of the bay.

John Woolfolk mechanically descended the three short steps to the
cabin. There had been something extraordinary in the woman's brief
appearance out of the odorous tangle of the shore, with its ruined
habitation. It had caught him unprepared, in a moment of half weary
relaxation, and his imagination responded with a faint question to
which it had been long unaccustomed. B