ense, lashes low and trembling upon her cheeks.

"I was ... afraid to leave you," she said in a faltering voice, under
the spell of this extraordinary mood. "I was afraid something might
happen to you, if I were long away."

"But what _could_ happen to me, here--on this uninhabited island?"

"I don't know.... It was silly of me, of course." With an evident
exertion of will power she threw off this perplexing mood of shyness,
and became more like herself, as he knew her. "Really, I presume, it was
mostly that I was afraid for myself--frightened of the loneliness,
fearful lest it be made more lonely for me by some accident--"

"Of course," he assented, puzzled beyond expression, cudgelling his wits
for some solution of a riddle sealed to his masculine obtuseness.

What could have happened to influence her so strangely? Could he have
said or done--anything--?

The problem held him in abstraction throughout the greater part of their
walk to the farm-house, though he heard and with ostensible intelligence
responded to her running accompaniment of comment and suggestion....

They threaded the cluster of buildings that, their usefulness outlived,
still encumbered the bluff bordering upon the beach. The most careless
and superficial glance bore out the impression conveyed by the girl's
description of the spot. Doorless doorways and windows with shattered
sashes disclosed glimpses of interiors fallen into a state of ruin
defying renovation. What remained intact of walls and roofs were mere
shells half filled with an agglomeration of worthlessness--mounds of
crumbled, mouldering plaster, shards, rust-eaten tins, broken bottles,
shreds of what had once been garments: the whole perhaps threatened by
the overhanging skeleton of a crazy staircase.... An evil, disturbing
spot, exhaling an atmosphere more melancholy and disheartening than that
of a rain-sodden November woodland: a haunted place, where the hand of
Time had wrought devastation with the wanton efficacy of a destructive
child: a good place to pass through quickly and ever thereafter to
avoid.

In relief against it the uplands seemed the brighter, stretching away in
the soft golden light of the descending sun. The wind sang over them a
boisterous song of strength and the sweep of open spaces. The air was
damp and soft and sweet with the scent of heather. Straggling sheep
suspended for a moment their meditative cropping and lifted their heads
to watch the strangers w