to the farthest window, closed the shutters.
The hinges gave out a rasping grind, as if they had not been turned
for months, and there was a faint rattle of falling particles of
rusted iron. The man forced shut a second set of shutters with a
sudden violence and went slowly back into the house. Millie Stope said
once more:

"Good night."

It was evident to Woolfolk that he could gain nothing more at present;
and stifling an angry protest, an impatient troop of questions, he
turned and strode back to the tender. However, he hadn't the slightest
intention of following Millie's indirectly expressed wish for him to
leave. He had the odd conviction that at heart she did not want him to
go; the evening, he elaborated this feeling, had been all a strange
piece of acting. Tomorrow he would tear apart the veil that hid her
from him; he would ignore her every protest and force the truth from
her.

He lifted the tender's anchor from the sand and pulled sharply across
the water to the _Gar_. A reddish, misshapen moon hung in the east,
and when he had mounted to his deck it was suddenly obscured by a
high, racing scud of cloud; the air had a damper, thicker feel. He
instinctively moved to the barometer, which he found depressed. The
wind, that had continued steadily since the night before, increased,
and there was a corresponding stir among the branches ashore, a
slapping of the yacht's cordage against the spars. He turned forward
and half absently noted the increasing strain on the hawser
disappearing into the dark tide. The anchor was firmly bedded. The
pervasive far murmur of the waves on the outer bars grew louder.

The yacht swung lightly over the choppy water, and a strong affection
for the ketch that had been his home, his occupation, his solace
through the past dreary years expanded his heart. He knew the _Gar's_
every capability and mood, and they were all good. She was an
exceptional boat. His feeling was acute, for he knew that the yacht
had been superseded. It was already an element of the past, of that
past in which Ellen lay dead in a tennis skirt, with a bright scarf
about her young waist.

He placed his hand on the mainmast, in the manner in which another
might drop a palm on the shoulder of a departing faithful companion,
and the wind in the rigging vibrated through the wood like a sentient
and affectionate response. Then he went resolutely down into the
cabin, facing the future.

John Woolfolk woke in the