abit and choice to say nothing, but if pushed to the
wall what was there that she would not say?

The dog, lying at her feet watching him steadily, did not give up to him
the secret of its own being or its opinion of himself; but if it once did
speak it would do both, and with no white lies in the words either. "The
girl is like her dog," thought Neckart.

She rose at last, and went across the sands to her father. Neckart was
soon conscious of an uneasy change in everything about him. The atmosphere
of sunlit rest was broken. The clouds only meant rain, the sand was sand,
and the sea but a wet swash of water: he began to look at his watch and
think of the trains. The influence that had quieted him so unaccountably
had been in the girl, then? He shut his eyes and tried to recall the
erect figure, the fall of yellow hair, the clear Scandinavian face. He
felt the same strong repulsion from her, yet in their brief interview she
had certainly affected him uncontrollably--brought him back to old boyish
ways of thinking. It was perhaps, he thought, because he was unused to
such absolutely honest women.

He sauntered up the beach, and in five minutes wondered how he had based
such magniloquent ideas on a child out for a holiday. The fishermen on
this solitary beach apparently made a holiday whenever Swendon and Jane
came, and humored the latter in all her vagaries. No doubt they would have
preferred to eat properly in their own kitchens, but the cloth was spread
on the sand beside the fire. The captain, with the perspiration streaming,
was broiling ham at the end of a long stick; Sutphen cleaned the crabs;
Lantrim's wife cooked the perch, and Jane herself was making the coffee.

"Don't speak to me: I'm counting," as Mr. Neckart stopped beside her.
"Five, six, seven. You can't trifle when you make coffee," peering into
the pot with the gravity of a judge on the bench.

The smell of the broiling ham in the salt air suddenly brought back to
Neckart a day when he had gone fishing with his mother in the old place in
Delaware. How happy and hungry they were!

"Give me your stick, captain. You are burning up," he said, sitting down
on the log beside him.

"You've been on this beach afore, sir?" said Sutphen, who was his
neighbor, and felt it his duty to play host.

"Never but once, when the Argyle went ashore."

"You were here fur the Treasury Department?"

"Yes. Did you know anything about that case?" eying him with sudden