cond ruined pile that fronted the
bay. The steps to the gaping entrance had rotted away and they were
forced to mount an insecure side piece. The interior, as Woolfolk had
seen, was composed of one high room, while, above, a narrow, open
second story hung like a ledge. On both sides were long counters with
mounting sets of shelves behind them.

"This was the store," Millie told him. "It was a great estate."

A dim and moldering fragment of cotton stuff was hanging from a
forgotten bolt; above, some tinware was eaten with rust; a scale had
crushed in the floor and lay broken on the earth beneath; and a
ledger, its leaves a single, sodden film of grey, was still open on a
counter. A precarious stair mounted to the flooring above, and Millie
Stope made her way upward, followed by Woolfolk.

There, in the double gloom of the clouds and a small dormer window
obscured by cobwebs, she sank on a broken box. The decayed walls shook
perilously in the blasts of the wind. Below they could see the empty
floor, and through the doorway the somber, gleaming greenery without.

All the patient expostulation that John Woolfolk had prepared
disappeared in a sudden tyranny of emotion, of hunger for the slender,
weary figure before him. Seating himself at her side, he burst into a
torrential expression of passionate desire that mounted with the tide
of his eager words. He caught her hands, held them in a painful grip,
and gazed down into her still, frightened face. He stopped abruptly,
was silent for a tempestuous moment, and then baldly repeated the fact
of his love.

Millie Stope said:

"I know so little about the love you mean." Her voice trailed to
silence; and in a lull of the storm they heard the thin patter of rats
on the floor below, the stir of bats among the rafters.

"It's quickly learned," he assured her. "Millie, do you feel any
response at all in your heart--the slightest return of my longing?"

"I don't know," she answered, turning toward him a troubled scrutiny.
"Perhaps in another surrounding, with things different, I might care
for you very much----"

"I am going to take you into that other surrounding," he announced.

She ignored his interruption. "But we shall never have a chance to
learn." She silenced his attempted protest with a cool, flexible palm
against his mouth. "Life," she continued, "is so dreadfully in the
dark. One is lost at the beginning. There are maps to take you safely
to the Guianas, but none