ith timorous, stupid eyes. A flock of young
turkeys fled in discordant agitation from their path.

Halfway up to the farm-house a memory shot through Whitaker's mind as
startling as lightning streaking athwart a peaceful evening sky. He
stopped with an exclamation that brought the girl beside him to a
standstill with questioning eyes.

"But the others--!" he stammered.

"The others?" she repeated blankly.

"They--the men who brought you here--?"

Her lips tightened. She moved her head in slow negation.

"I have seen nothing of either of them."

Horror and pity filled him, conjuring up a vision of wild, raving
waters, mad with blood-lust, and in their jaws, arms and heads
helplessly whirling and tossing.

"Poor devils!" he muttered.

She said nothing. When he looked for sympathy in her face, he found it
set and inscrutable.

He delayed another moment, thinking that soon she must speak, offer him
some sort of explanation. But she remained uncommunicative. And he could
not bring himself to seem anxious to pry into her affairs.

He took a tentative step onward. She responded instantly to the
suggestion, but in silence.

The farm-house stood on high ground, commanding an uninterrupted sweep
of the horizon. As they drew near it, Whitaker paused and turned,
narrowing his eyes as he attempted to read the riddle of the enigmatic,
amber-tinted distances.

To north and east the island fell away in irregular terraces to wide,
crescent beaches whose horns, joining in the northeast, formed the sandy
spit. To west and south the moorlands billowed up to the brink of a
precipitous bluff. In the west, Whitaker noted absently, a great
congregation of gulls were milling amid a cacophony of screams, just
beyond the declivity. Far over the northern water the dark promontory
was blending into violet shadows which, in turn, blended imperceptibly
with the more sombre shade of the sea. Beyond it nothing was
discernable. Southeast from it the coast, backed by dusky highlands, ran
on for several miles to another, but less impressive, headland; its
line, at an angle to that of the deserted island, forming a funnel-like
tideway for the intervening waters fully six miles at its broadest in
the north, narrowing in the east to something over three miles.

There was not a sail visible in all the blue cup of the sea.

"I don't know," said Whitaker slowly, as much to himself as to his
companion. "It's odd ... it passes me...."

"Can't