. She passed,
looked back, slashed a piece of dripping kelp through the air so close
that salt drops stung his pale eyes, laughed aloud, and at the top of
her laugh, broke into a wild, sweet song unfamiliar to him. It was a
voice unlike the flat voices of women thereabouts--strong, sweet,
sustained, throbbing with a personal sense of the passion which lurked
in the warm notes.

Her foot was bare, and more shapely in consequence than if she had had a
habit of wearing shoes. Its shape was the delicate shape of strength
native to such a foot, and each toe left its print distinct and even in
the dust. With his eye for queer details, he remembered that print and
associated with it the yellow-rutted road, the rusty alders in the
meadow beyond, and the pale spire of the church thrust into a November
sky.

He called this to mind when on the night of the dance information came
to his ear that she had sold her pearls to lift the lien on Cap'n Sam
Dreed's ship, with her own hands tearing down the libel from the mast
and grinding it under her heel.

No man whom she had once passed and silently interrogated could quite
forget her, not even Jethro Rackby. The harbor master swayed on his
oars, collected himself, and looked forward across the dimpled floor of
his harbor, which in its quietude was like a lump of massy silver or
rich ore, displaying here and there a spur of light, a surface sparkle.
The serenity of his own soul was in part a reflection of this nightly
calm, when the spruce on the bank could not be known from its fellow in
the water by a man standing on his head. Moreover, to maintain this
calm was the plain duty of the harbor master. For five years he had held
that office by an annual vote of the town meeting. With his title went
authority to say where were the harbor lines, to order the removal of
hulks, to provide for keeping open a channel through winter ice--in a
word, to keep the peace. This peace was of his own substance.

It was rudely shattered. On the night following the dance Cad Sills put
herself in his path for the second time and this time she gave him short
shrift. He was pushing forward, near sundown, to take the impulse of an
eddy at the edge of Pull-an'-be-Damned when he saw that predatory,
songful woman balanced knee-deep in rushing water, her arms tossing.

"She's drowning herself after her quarrel with Sam Dreed," was his first
thought. He had just heard a fine tale of that quarrel. The truth was