s well be on a
desert island out there on the water and she the only woman on it.

"Feel a bit chilly? You'd better put on this sweater."

She took it from him but laid it aside. "No. The air's too warm," she
said. "Oh, ho, I'm so sleepy," and she stretched herself out again with
her hands under her head.

"I'm not," said Martin. "I'm tremendously awake. Let's talk if you're
not in a hurry to get back."

"I'm very happy here," she answered. "But must we have that lamp? It
glares and makes the cabin hot."

"The moon's better than all the lamps," said Martin, and put it out. He
sat on his bunk and the gleam of his cigarette came and went. It was
like a big firefly in the half dark cabin. "To-morrow," he said to
himself, with a tingle running through his blood, "to-morrow--and Joan."

Tootles waited for him to speak. She might as well have been miles away
for all that she affected him. He seemed to have forgotten that she was
alive.

He had. And there was a long silence.

"To-morrow,--and Joan. That's it. I'll go over to Easthampton and take
her away from that house and talk to her. This time I'll break
everything down and tell her what she means to me. I've never told her
that."

"He doesn't care," thought Tootles. "I'm no more than an old shoe to
him."

"If I'd told her it might have made a difference. Even if she had
laughed at me she would have had something to catch hold of if she
wanted it. By Jove, I wish I'd had the pluck to tell her."

"He even looks at me and doesn't see me," she went on thinking, her
hopes withering like cut flowers, her eagerness petering out and a
great humiliation creeping over her. "What's the matter with me? Some
people think I'm pretty. Irene does ... and last night, when I kissed
him there was an answer.... Has that girl come between us again?"

And so they went on, these two, divided by a thousand miles, each
absorbed in individual thought, and there was a long queer silence.

But she was there to fight, and having learned one side of men during
her sordid pilgrimage and having an ally in Nature, she got up and sat
down on the bunk at his side, snuggling close.

"You are cold, Tootles," he said, and put his arm round her.

And hope revived, like a dying fire licked by a sudden breeze, and she
put her bobbed head on his broad shoulder.

But he was away again, miles and miles away, thinking back, unfolding
all the moments of his first companionship with Joan and looking