he was
indebted for material prosperity to Joan--to the slender, level-browed
girl with romance shining out of her gray eyes and adventure shouting
from the long-barrelled Colt's on her hip, who had landed on the beach
that piping gale, along with her stalwart Tahitian crew, and who had
entered his bungalow to hang with boy's hands her revolver-belt and Baden-
Powell hat on the nail by the billiard table. He forgot all the early
exasperations, remembering only her charms and sweetnesses and glorying
much in the traits he at first had disliked most--her boyishness and
adventurousness, her delight to swim and risk the sharks, her desire to
go recruiting, her love of the sea and ships, her sharp authoritative
words when she launched the whale-boat and, with firestick in one hand
and dynamite-stick in the other, departed with her picturesque crew to
shoot fish in the Balesuna; her super-innocent disdain for the commonest
conventions, her juvenile joy in argument, her fluttering, wild-bird love
of freedom and mad passion for independence. All this he now loved, and
he no longer desired to tame and hold her, though the paradox was the
winning of her without the taming and the holding.

There were times when he was dizzy with thought of her and love of her,
when he would stop his horse and with closed eyes picture her as he had
seen her that first day, in the stern-sheets of the whale-boat, dashing
madly in to shore and marching belligerently along his veranda to remark
that it was pretty hospitality this letting strangers sink or swim in his
front yard. And as he opened his eyes and urged his horse onward, he
would ponder for the ten thousandth time how possibly he was ever to hold
her when she was so wild and bird-like that she was bound to flutter out
and away from under his hand.

It was patent to Sheldon that Tudor had become interested in Joan. That
convalescent visitor practically lived on the veranda, though, while
preposterously weak and shaky in the legs, he had for some time insisted
on coming in to join them at the table at meals. The first warning
Sheldon had of the other's growing interest in the girl was when Tudor
eased down and finally ceased pricking him with his habitual sharpness of
quip and speech. This cessation of verbal sparring was like the breaking
off of diplomatic relations between countries at the beginning of war,
and, once Sheldon's suspicions were aroused, he was not long in finding
other