to her. She saw an opening among gloomy pines, empty, silent, unreal.
No haunted house, no barren moor, no neglected graveyard ever spoke more
poignantly, more mournfully, with such utter hopelessness. There was no
sign of his or of her former presence. Across the open space something
had passed its hand, and it had changed. What had been a trysting-place,
a bower, a nest, had become a tomb. A tomb, she felt, for something that
once had been brave, fine, and beautiful, but which now was dead. She
had but one desire, to escape from the place, to put it away from her
forever, to remember it, not as she now found it, but as first she had
remembered it, and as now she must always remember It. She turned softly
on tiptoe as one who has intruded on a shrine.

But before she could escape there came from the sea a sudden gust of
wind that caught her by the skirts and drew her back, that set the
branches tossing and swept the dead leaves racing about her ankles. And
at the same instant from just above her head there beat upon the air a
violent, joyous tattoo--a sound that was neither of the sea nor of the
woods, a creaking, swiftly repeated sound, like the flutter of caged
wings.

Helen turned in alarm and raised her eyes--and beheld the sailorman.

Tossing his arms in a delirious welcome, waltzing in a frenzy of joy,
calling her back to him with wild beckonings, she saw him smiling down
at her with the same radiant, beseeching, worshipping smile. In Helen's
ears Latimer's commands to the sailorman rang as clearly as though
Latimer stood before her and had just spoken. Only now they were no
longer a jest; they were a vow, a promise, an oath of allegiance that
brought to her peace, and pride, and happiness.

"So long as I love this beautiful lady," had been his foolish words,
"you will guard this place. It is a life sentence!"

With one hand Helen Page dragged down the branch on which the sailorman
stood, with the other she snatched him from his post of duty. With a
joyous laugh that was a sob, she clutched the sailorman in both her
hands and kissed the beseeching, worshipping smile.

An hour later her car, on its way to Boston, passed through Fair
Harbor at a rate of speed that caused her chauffeur to pray between
his chattering teeth that the first policeman would save their lives by
landing them in jail.

At the wheel, her shoulders thrown forward, her eyes searching the dark
places beyond the reach of the leaping head