he river, in breezes which brought old tales down
from the Catskills.

She would have been content to sit there for hours, listening to the
twilight, absently pleating the coarse table-cloth, trying to sip the
saline claret which he insisted on their drinking. She wanted nothing
more.... And she had so manoeuvered their chairs that the left side of
her face, the better side, was toward him!

But Walter grew restless. He stared at the German yachtsmen, at their
children who ate lumps of sugar dipped in claret, and their wives who
drank beer. He commented needlessly on a cat which prowled along the
terrace rail. He touched Una's foot with his, and suddenly condemned
himself for not having been able to bring her to a better restaurant. He
volubly pointed out that their roast chicken had been petrified--"vile
restaurant, very vile food."

"Why, I love it here!" she protested. "I'm perfectly happy to be just
like this."

As she turned to him with a smile that told all her tenderness, she
noted how his eyes kept stealing from the riverside to her, and back
again, how his hands trembled as he clapped two thick glass salt-shakers
together. A current of uneasiness darted between them.

He sprang up. "Oh, I can't sit still!" he said. "Come on. Let's walk
down along the river."

"Oh, can't we just sit here and be quiet?" she pleaded, but he rubbed
his chin and shook his head and sputtered: "Oh, rats, you can't see the
river, now that they've turned on the electric lights here. Come on.
Besides, it'll be cooler right by the river."

She felt a menace; the darkness beyond them was no longer dreaming, but
terror-filled. She wanted to refuse, but he was so fretfully demanding
that she could only obey him.

Up on the crest of the Palisades is an "amusement park," and suburbs and
crowded paths; and across the river is New York, in a solid mass of
apartment-houses; but between Palisades and river, at the foot of the
cliffs, is an unfrequented path which still keeps some of the wildness
it had when it was a war-path of the Indians. It climbs ridges, twists
among rocks, dips into damp hollows, widens out into tiny bowling-greens
for Hendrik Hudson's fairy men. By night it is ghostly, and beside it
the river whispers strange tragedies.

Along this path the city children crept, unspeaking, save when his two
hands, clasping her waist to guide her down a rocky descent, were
clamorous.

Where a bare sand jetty ran from the path out