catboats near the little pier. Several people were sitting on it in
bathing clothes, and some one was teaching a little girl to swim. The
echo of her gurgling laughter and little cries came to them clearly.
The sound of music and shuffling feet grew fainter and fainter.
Gardiner's Island lay up against the horizon like a long inflated sand
bag. There were crickets everywhere. Three or four large butterflies
gamboled in the shimmering air.

Away out, heading homewards, Martin's yawl, with Irene lying full
stretch on the roof of the cabin, and Howard whistling for a wind,
crept through the water, inch by inch.

With the tiller under one arm and a pipe in his mouth, long empty, sat
Martin, thinking about Joan. Hearing voices, Tootles looked up from a
book that she was trying to read. She had been lying in the hammock on
the stoop of Martin's cottage for an hour, waiting for Martin. It had
taken her a long time to do her hair and immense pains to satisfy
herself that she looked nice,--for Martin. Her plan was cut and dried
in her mind, and she had been killing time with all the impatience and
throbbing of nerves of one who had brought herself up to a crisis which
meant either success and joy, or failure and a drab world. She couldn't
bear to go through another day without bringing about a decision. She
felt that she had to jog Fate's elbow, whatever was to be the insult.
She had discovered from a casual remark of Howard's that Martin, those
hot nights, had taken to sleeping on the boat. Her plan, deliberately
conceived as a follow-up to what had happened out under the stars the
night before, was to swim out to it and wait for him in the cabin. She
knew, no one so well, that it was in the nature of a forlorn hope, but
she was desperate. She loved him intransitively, to the utter
extinction of the little light of modesty which her hand-to-mouth
existence had left burning. She wanted love or death, and she was going
to put up this last fight for love with all the unscrupulousness of a
lovesick woman.

She saw two people coming towards the cottage, a tall, fair, sun-tanned
youth, hatless and frank-eyed like Martin, and--

She got up. A cold hand seemed suddenly to have been placed on her
heart. Joan,--it was Joan, the girl who, once before, at Martin's
house, had sent the earth spinning from under her feet and put Martin
suddenly behind barbed wire. What hideous trick was this of Fate's? Why
was this moment the one chosen