Still, my tutor was a
highly educated scholar--my father." Neither spinster noticed the
reluctance in the tones.

"Ah! I see. He suddenly realized that he could not keep you for
ever in this part of the world; so he sends you to your aunt. That
dress! Only a man--and an unworldly one--would have permitted you
to proceed on your adventure dressed in a gown thirty years out of
date. What is your father's business?"

The question was an impertinence, but Ruth was not aware of that.

"Souls," she answered, drily.

"A missioner! That illuminates everything." The spinster's face
actually became warm. "You will finish your education in the East
and return. I see."

"No. I shall never come back."

Something in the child's voice, something in her manner, warned the
spinster that her well-meaning inquisitiveness had received a
set-back and that it would be dangerous to press it forward again.
What she had termed illuminative now appeared to be only another
phase of the mystery which enveloped the child. A sinister thought
edged in. Who could say that the girl's father had not once been a
fashionable clergyman in the States and that drink had got him and
forced him down, step by step, until--to use the child's odd
expression--he had come upon the beach? She was cynical, this
spinster. There was no such a thing as perfection in a mixed world.
Clergymen were human. Still, it was rather terrible to suspect that
one had fallen from grace, but nevertheless the thing was possible.
With the last glimmer of decency he had sent the daughter to his
sister. The poor child! What frightful things she must have seen on
that island of hers!

The noise of crashing glass caused a diversion; and Ruth turned
gratefully toward the sound.

The young man had knocked over the siphon. He rose, steadied
himself, then walked out of the dining room. Except for the dull
eyes and the extreme pallor of his face, there was nothing else to
indicate that he was deep in liquor. He did not stagger in the
least. And in this fact lay his danger. The man who staggers, whose
face is flushed, whose attitude is either noisily friendly or
truculent, has some chance; liquor bends him eventually. But men of
the Spurlock type, who walk straight, who are unobtrusive and
intensely pale, they break swiftly and inexplicably. They seldom
arrive on the beach. There are way-stations--even terminals.

There was still the pity of understanding in Ruth's eyes. Perhaps
i