he became daring. "So, thou shalt save
my life," he said, speaking in French. "We shall be quits then, thou and
I."

The familiar French thou startled her. To hide the instant's confusion
she turned her head away, using a hand to gather in her hair, which the
wind was lifting lightly.

"That wouldn't quite make us quits," she rejoined; "your life is
important, mine isn't. You"--she nodded towards the Narcissus--"you
command men."

"So dost thou," he answered, persisting in the endearing pronoun.

He meant it to be endearing. As he had sailed up and down the world,
a hundred ports had offered him a hundred adventures, all light in
the scales of purpose, but not all bad. He had gossiped and idled and
coquetted with beauty before; but this was different, because the nature
of the girl was different from all others he had met. It had mostly been
lightly come and lightly go with himself, as with the women it had
been easily won and easily loosed. Conscience had not smitten him
hard, because beauty, as he had known it, though often fair and of good
report, had bloomed for others before he came. But here was a nature
fresh and unspoiled from the hand of the potter Life.

As her head slightly turned from him again, he involuntarily noticed the
pulse beating in her neck, the rise and fall of her bosom. Life--here
was life unpoisoned by one drop of ill thought or light experience.

"Thou dost command men too," he repeated.

She stepped forward a little from the doorway and beyond him, answering
back at him:

"Oh, no, I only knit, and keep a garden, and command a little home,
that's all.... Won't you let me show you the island?" she added quickly,
pointing to a hillock beyond, and moving towards it. He followed,
speaking over her shoulder:

"That's what you seem to do," he answered, "not what you do." Then he
added rhetorically: "I've seen a man polishing the buckle of his shoe,
and he was planning to take a city or manoeuvre a fleet."

She noticed that he had dropped the thou, and, much as its use had
embarrassed her, the gap left when the boldness was withdrawn became
filled with regret, for, though no one had dared to say it to her
before, somehow it seemed not rude on Philip's lips. Philip? Yes, Philip
she had called him in her childhood, and the name had been carried on
into her girlhood--he had always been Philip to her.

"No, girls don't think like that, and they don't do big things," she
replied. "When I pol