ar off to the south
flashed the light of the Hook, and still other signals gleamed low from
the ocean.

Here I came often with Eleanore, for she had now come back to town. In
her boat we went to many new spots and back to all the old ones. We
found new beauties in them all. At home in the evenings we had long
talks. And all the time I could feel that we two both knew what was
coming, that steadily we were drawing together, that all my work and my
view of the harbor took its joy and its glory from this.

"In a little while," I thought.

CHAPTER XVI

I had been little at home those days, for the house in Brooklyn
disturbed me now. Poor old Dad. Since I had secured my contract he had
tried so hard to help me, to be eager, interested, alive, to talk it all
over with me at night. And this I did not like to do. A vague feeling of
guilt and disloyalty would creep into my now boundless zest for the
harbor that had crowded him out. And I think that he suspected this. One
night, when with this feeling I stupidly tried to talk as though I still
hated all its ugliness, its clamor, smoke and grime, I caught a twinkle
of pain in his eyes.

"Boy," he broke in roughly, "I hope you'll always talk and write what
you believe and nothing else! I wouldn't give a picayune for any chap
who didn't!"

I could feel him watching anxiously my affair with Eleanore. In the days
when she had come to the house he had grown very fond of her, and now by
frequent questions, slipped in with a studied indifference, he showed an
interest which in time became a deep suspense.

"Out again this evening, son?" he called in one night from the bathroom
where he was washing his hands and face before going down to supper. In
my room adjoining I was dressing to go out.

"Yes, Dad."

"What for?"

"Some work."

"Be out for dinner too?"

"Yes."

"Who with?"

"Oh, a pilot," I answered abstractedly. I was wondering if she would
wear her blue gown. She had asked quite a number of people that night.
Then I saw Dad in the doorway. Briskly rubbing his gray head with a
towel, he was eyeing my evening clothes.

"Devilish polished chaps these days--pilots," he commented. I heard a
low snort of glee from his room.

My sister, on the other hand, had no more patience than before with this
fast deepening love of mine, which had drawn me away from her radical
friends up to the men of the tower who worked for the big companies. By
the most vigorous iro